sunny side up! It's been quite a year for the irrepressible Kate Hudson.

Byline: Eve Macsweeney

Your body is sick!"

We're in a hotel room in Beverly Hills, where Kate Hudson is trying on clothes for her Vogue shoot, surrounded by fashion staff, a tailor on hand for alterations, and a pair of blonde girlfriends who make up part of Hudson's posse, most of them childhood pals, which gathers for fun and company and birthdays and holidays around the globe. (Last night was Halloween, and the girls had a party at Kate's house.)

"I've gotta start taking that dance class," adds Sammy, who made the comment, a little ruefully.

Kate's body is indeed sick-tall and slim with an incredible pair of legs on which an impressive muscle occasionally pops above the knee, earned, no doubt, from many years of hard labor on the soccer field and in the dance studio, where Hudson takes jazz three or four times a week. Cheerfully she tries on the clothes, declaring each outfit even better than the last, before shimmying back into a tiny pair of Rock & Republic jeans, a stripey T-shirt, and Brian Atwood heels.

Offscreen as much as on-, there's something about watching Kate Hudson that makes a person feel relaxed (or at least a woman; her effect on men may be of the more stimulating kind). In movies, her winning charm and adeptness at physical comedy combine to conjure a world lighter, brighter, and more manageable than our own. If only life could be this much cozier and less complicated, with a happy outcome just around the corner! (This is a scenario we can look forward to in her latest romantic comedy, Fool's Gold, an escapist adventure in which she is reunited with costar Matthew McConaughey.) Despite emerging from a year that would have knocked most of us thoroughly for six-it included her divorce from Chris Robinson, leaving her the single mother of their son, Ryder, who turns four this month, and the demise of her romance with Owen Wilson, culminating in his widely reported suicide attempt-she is clearly a natural optimist, older and wiser, perhaps, but no less sanguine than before.

Today she's in a particularly good mood because we're off to visit the site of her latest sideline, a range of natural hair products she has developed with her longtime friend and hairdresser David Babaii. This idea came to Kate, who turns out to have a lot of restless energy and numerous surprising projects on the boil, after a friend of hers developed breast cancer and began researching the possible connections between additives in her beauty products and the disease (a link that has never been definitively established but remains the subject of contentious debate). Kate went through her own bathroom cabinets, tossing anything that used "sulfates, parabens, or animal testing . . . all of the so-called dirty dozen," and then scoured the shelves of such stores as Whole Foods and Sephora looking for alternatives. She found some cosmetics lines she liked but discovered that "you can't find shampoos. It's impossible." With the sort of methodical logic that will likely swell her bank balance, Kate decided to make her own. She signed up for a business course online and partnered with David in a division of labor she describes as "heavy lifting" for him and (her aversion to animal testing notwithstanding) being "basically the guinea pig" for her.