In conversation with Indie Lee

Kindred Conversation no. 1 — a founder and clean beauty pioneer on the quiet courage of building a life around intention.

I've wanted to sit down with Indie Lee for a long time. Not because she built one of the first clean skincare companies, though she did, but because of what came before it: an illness in her thirties, a question about what she'd been letting near her body and into her home, and a decision to live differently. That isn't a business origin story. That's the setting down. I recognized it the moment she told it.

The moment I stopped performing wellness and started living it, everything changed.

Indie founded her company long before "clean" was a word the industry used, and she has spent the years since reading labels so the rest of us don't have to. What struck me in our conversation wasn't the expertise, though there's plenty. It was how ordinary she makes it sound — the small daily choices, the attention, the refusal to let fear run the house. She talks about ingredients the way I talk about the garden: as things you come to know slowly, and then can't unknow.

We talked about slowing down, and how hard it actually is. About the rituals that ground her on the days nobody is watching. About what conscious living looks like when it isn't being photographed — which is, I think, the only place it's real.

She was more honest than most founders would be about what she still gets wrong. I found that the most reassuring part.

The whole conversation is here, and it's worth your time.

Read the conversation

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Kindred Conversations is where we sit with the founders, healers, artists and visionaries we admire — the women quietly redefining what it means to live well. If there's someone you'd want us to talk to, write to us.