Kelly Gale’s new beauty brand, Chandra Beauti, offers her supermodel-approved cure for cellulite

Kelly Gale has always been a whiz in the kitchen. Sure, she knows her way around a clean and healthy meal (lately she’s cut out seed oils, which she swears is a game-changer), but we’re not speaking of her culinary prowess. Rather, a different sort of alchemy. “My mother starting bringing me and my brother into the kitchen at a very young age,” she says. “And she would make both food to eat and stuff to put on our bodies.” A cancer researcher, Gale’s mother taught her children never to put anything on their skin that wasn’t safe to consume. This turned out to be a particularly good lesson for Gale, who began modelling in her teens – an industry that demands a pristine complexion. “She was teaching me what to do and what not to do,” she says, noting she began these cooking lessons at three-years-old. “And at the same time it was like, look how fun it is to whip up shea butter and rose powder.”

These kitchen experiments planted the first seed for Gale’s newest venture: Chandra Beauti, a completely natural, plant-forward beauty brand. Like the products themselves – a body scrub and a body oil to start – the name, which roughly translates to glittering moon in Hindi, finds its inspiration in Gale’s mother, who was born in India and adopted to Swedish parents as a child. “Lately [India] is the place I’ve been drawn to most – I feel like this is where I’m really from,” says Gale, who grew up in Sweden. “When I land there, there’s an energy and a feeling.”

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There was another formative experience that paved the way for Chandra. As Gale’s modelling career began taking off, she began to get cellulite. “When I was 13, my body started to change a little bit – like for all women,” she says. “There was a specific shoot where my agency got an email from the client saying, ‘We don’t want to pay her rate. Look at these photos we snuck behind the scenes, she has cellulite. It’s going to cost all this money to retouch it’.” Outrageously, Gale’s agency showed their young client the email.

To make matters more frustrating, Gale was already doing everything right. She played soccer and tennis every day, she had a healthy and mindful diet. Meanwhile, all the cellulite cream on the market at the time had “a hundred ingredients”, none of which seemed to work. So Gale, along with her mother, headed back to the kitchen and started making their own. “We used plants and herbs that have properties for lymphatic drainage and circulation,” says Gale, name-dropping Cyprus, Juniper Berry, coffee and Gotu Kola. “I started to mix and match at home.” She had a couple years to solve the problem, at which point she would be 18 and eligible for her dream job: The Victoria’s Secret fashion show.

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The homemade remedies worked and Gale walked her first VS show in 2013. In fact, her homemade creams and scrubs worked so well that the other VS girls began asking Gale to make additional batches. “I would be covered in brown stuff and girls would walk in and be like, ‘What is that?’,” she recalls. “Then they’d ask to try some and these girls would fall in love with it. That’s when I realised I should maybe sell this one day, because I’d have girl call me and be like, ‘I know you’re busy but I’ll come to your apartment. I’ll pay you. I just really need more.”

Many of those same ingredients pop up in Chandra’s first products, which smell like an herbal fantasy and work like a drainage massage. Designed for everyday use, the Super Serum uses ingredients like Gotu Kola, Ashwagandha and Juniper Berry to promote lymphatic drainage, leading to smooth glowing skin. The Super Scrub, meanwhile, adds coffee grinds and Cyprus to the mix to reduce the appearance of cellulite.

Meanwhile, Gale predicts we’re at the precipice of a bigger conversation around cellulite and a greater understanding that it can affect all people of all body types. “There’s a stigma about it, and you’re not allowed to say that you don’t wish to have it. We’re supposed to love our bodies,” says Gale. “But you’re allowed to say you don’t like your acne, right?”

Skincare isn’t the only thing Gale is putting out into the world lately. Over the past several years she’s been quietly pursuing acting in earnest. She has two films coming out in the coming months, including an MMA-centred drama, co-starring Russell Crowe, Luke Hemsworth and Daniel MacPherson. Gale was adamant that her character, the wife of a fighter, didn’t fall into any common “wife” tropes. “I worked very intensely with the director on this specific thing – everything from the wardrobe choices to my inner world and inner dialogue,” she says, noting gratefully that director Tyler Atkins and MacPherson, who plays her husband in the film, were both very open to her input. “They were open to my character having more of a voice.”

While her modelling career has helped her transition into acting in some regards (“I don’t get nervous before a take – I’ve been on big stages before”), in other ways it had formed some habits she’s needed to break. “I was a kid when I started modelling, and everything was kind of stripped away. You don’t have a voice. You don’t speak up if someone is hurting you or pulling your hair. You learn to make yourself small and invisible,” she says. Her acting coach, however, has helped Gale “get in touch with her anger”, an emotion she had lost almost entirely over the years. She’s gotten so successful at portraying anger on screen that it’s bled into her personal life. Just ask her husband, fellow actor Joel Kinnaman. “Joel is probably like, ‘Why would I encourage her to be an actor?’,” she says, adding, “I was 23 when I found out I’m allowed to say no.”

Next year, Gale takes the small screen opposite Kinnaman in the hugely anticipated Harry Hole adaptation on Netflix. “I know he was nervous before because he was wondering how it was going to go,” says Gale of working together with her husband. “Like, what if we have a fight at home and then we get to set the next day? But it turned out to be the best thing ever, both for our relationship and for our work.”

It was a rare occasion in which they were working in the same city at the same time. Usually, one person is filming and the other is visiting (both keen to keep working, neither of them is especially good at being the visitor, but they suck it up for each other). Recently, Gale was visiting Kinnaman on production in Egypt, where she contracted typhoid, which began showing symptoms once she returned to Los Angeles. “I almost died,” she says, laughing. “Everyone was laughing at me when I suggested it could be typhoid, because I had been Googling. I’m like, ‘I’m definitely not going to make it through the night’. So I called Joel from the ambulance and said, ‘I’m so sorry I never had kids with you, I know you really wanted kids’.” When the fever broke the following day, she called him back and said something to the affect of, “I’m well now, never mind”.

Fair enough; Gale has plenty more to do before she adds mother to her already heaping plate. More films, more Chandra products. So how does her mum feel about inspiring Gale’s new empire? Gale grins and says, “She’s proud and she’s happy.”