15 Minutes with Rose-Marie Swift, a Cosmetics Maven Who Sees Colors in New Ways

Rose-Marie Swift tries on a wide-brimmed black hat in Cold Spring, New York.

“This is a great witch hat,” she says, looking for a mirror. The brim is so wide that if she were to wear it out of the shop, it wouldn’t fit through the doorway. Outside, a low fog cloaks the mountains, bringing cold, light rain in early October.

Rose-Marie wears a black turtleneck and tight black pants. She dresses austerely, yet gracefully, nearly shadow-like. The only color she wears is a red lipstick––this particular shade is one she’s created for her cosmetic brand, RMS Beauty.

Cold Spring’s main street slopes down towards the Hudson River. The colors of the leaves have begun to shift into yellows and burgundies. Spending even a little time with Rose-Marie, I begin to see these colors in new ways. How a sunset or foliage might look condensed into cosmetics and brushed across the cheek.

She is endlessly scouting new colors. Last March, for instance, she plucked azaleas from a bush in Bonaventure Cemetery in Savannah, Georgia. The flowers were a warm pink that she hoped to transform into a new shade of lipstick. But by the time she got home they’d wilted and the color distorted.

Rose-Marie will sit at a vinyl mat with a variety of shades of lipsticks and use a knife to cut the colors into bits that she thinks are reminiscent of the original color that inspired her. These experiments, especially when grinding flower pedals, seem almost alchemical.

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What is interesting to me is that, even if her brand features that high-fashion gloss you find on magazine covers, there seems to be something menacing just below the surface.

Rose-Marie is intrigued by iconic horror imagery. Nosferatu. Night of the Living Dead. Frankenstein. It’s possible these films influenced some of her earliest childhood cosmetic experiments. There was that time in elementary school when she wrote and directed a play in which she got to be Lily Munster. She mixed flour with food coloring and baked it in the oven to make green face paint.

We walk up the hill, past jack-o’-lanterns grinning wide on the steps of antique shops, and take a seat in a busy restaurant near a large window overlooking Main Street. Rose-Marie sits beneath a large oil painting of a slim, mysterious woman in a red cloak. The cloak matches Rose-Marie’s lips. It’s almost as if it’s a painting of a distant ancestor, a monarch from another world.

She pushes her glasses onto the top of her head, hair back, and when she speaks she does so with such conviction, hands waving, that in the cramped restaurant, everyone else seems to hush and lean their ears towards our table, curious what she has to say.

Rose-Marie was born in 1955 and grew up in West Vancouver. Although she’s lived in Manhattan for many years now, you can still vaguely hear Canada in the way she says sorry.

“I was trying to be a model,” she says, remembering her early twenties in Vancouver, “but then I got into a punk band.” She was the lead singer­­––inspired by artists like Nina Hagen and Siouxsie and the Banshees.

If it wasn’t for the fact that she couldn’t afford her own microphone, she might not have become a makeup artist. Her sister had been studying to be an aesthetician and she knew a guy who owned some hotels in Vancouver. Many of those hotels featured burlesque shows.

Some of the dancers were interested in learning how to take better care of their skin. So Rose-Marie met the dancers in a conference room and began to paint their faces before shifts. The extra cash would buy her a microphone, but it didn’t take long for this to become a full-time job. Even though her band had played some big shows in just one year, opening for The Ramones and The Stranglers, they had a falling out and she quit.

When another local makeup artist asked if she’d be interested in filling in for him to do the makeup on a model for the cover of Vancouver Magazine, her career, almost suddenly, jolted into a life of constant travel. It seemed as though the moment her work was featured in Vancouver Magazine she began to zigzag the world and before long was doing makeup on supermodels.

She studies faces. Skin is the first thing she notices on a person. She can tell by the condition of someone’s skin if they’re sick, or eating poorly, or getting enough sleep. It was years ago that her skin started showing signs of sickness.

At first, she noticed rashes on her hands. Then came the anxiety attacks and memory loss. When she finally got tested, the lab knew right away that these were the symptoms of chemicals from the cosmetics. A consequence of years of being a makeup artist––using her hands as palettes to mix colors. They found pesticides, aluminum, lead and mercury in her system.

She started to purge herself of many of the things she’d typically use. And as soon as she would put her old lipstick back on, her lips would burn.

“I just realized there’s so much shit in makeup. I had to do my own brand. I guess the universe was pushing me to do it.” It took a few years and a chemist-friend to experiment with ingredients in the lab, but after years of perfecting her recipes, she launched RMS Beauty.

My wife, Nancy, met Rose-Marie years ago, when she reached out to her with some questions about her brand. At the time, it wasn’t as easy to find RMS Beauty in any store near where we lived, so Rose-Marie invited her to a shop in Manhattan so she could try samples––to blend colors where the cheekbones meet the neck, to make sure the makeup matched the tone of her skin.

Until I’d met Rose-Marie, I never gave much thought to the process of creating cosmetics. I assumed that these things were designed by algorithms, pumped through factories, and shipped-out via tractor-trailer––like paints in Home Depot. And that might be true for some of those giant cosmetics corporations, but not Rose-Marie’s.

“The beauty industry right now is run by dinosaurs and they are not letting go. People need to be more curious. Ask questions. What’s in these things we put on our bodies?”

When she talks about her fears for the future of the beauty industry, she speaks from an almost forlorn place. She was in Europe right after Chernobyl. She was one of the first people to walk through the dismantled Berlin Wall to see the decrepit war zone of East Germany. She was in Hurricane Andrew. She was on University Place when the Twin Towers fell.

“My mother always says, ‘what catastrophe are you gonna be in now?’”

I ask her what she takes from having been in such close proximity to so many devastating moments in history. She says it’s all part of her personal growth and chalks it up to the whims of the universe. She finds solace in astrology. It’s become a map through which she can navigate life. It helps her understand why people are the way they are. She can’t help but look beneath the surface of all things and ask why or how.

She started studying astrology when she was about fourteen. For her, astrology also offers a way to get conversations going with certain models who might be nervous or reserved as they sit in her chair before going in front of a camera. I imagine there’s a vulnerability that can come with sitting in a chair, having someone work on your face, studying every angle. In this way, I see Rose-Marie as a fortune-teller, learning the times of day these models were born and how they might fit into the order of the universe.

She used to get nervous herself when working on some of her first supermodels. She’d stand about as far away from the women as possible. I think of Matisse painting his canvases with a six-foot brush––though Rose-Marie’s canvases are living organisms that shift from pose to pose.

“Now I make [the models] open their mouths wide to make sure the lips are perfectly painted. That every eyelash is curled just right. After a while,” she says, “you almost begin to disassociate that fact that there’s even a human in there.” She doesn’t wear heavy rings or bracelets that might hinder the way her hands work. The models that she’s worked on tell her that she’s like a feather on their faces. “My touch is almost invisible,” she says.

We make our way down to the willow trees at the bottom of Main Street, where the town meets the river. She says that when she’s created a new color she likes to walk around the city streets and stop strangers whose skin tone she thinks might work as the perfect canvas on which to experiment. She says no one has ever said no.

Seeing as how Rose-Marie has worked on the faces of celebrities like Gisele Bündchen and Zoe Saldana and Miranda Kerr, it’s hard not to think about what defines beauty today.

I wonder if she and I are even seeing the colors in the harbor in the same way. She observes the dark water and the fog hovering above the river, and I imagine her spinning the color wheel in her mind, processing each color she’d have to cut and grind to reproduce, as best she can, new shades of lipstick or blush. Just as beauty is an abstract, relative idea, color, too, is a trick of the eye. We have our own built-in impulsive reactions to certain colors. Black for death. Red for lust. Green for envy.

I ask Rose-Marie what she finds beautiful. She loves how something quiet can be beautiful––like the Spanish moss that hangs like witch hair from the live oaks in Savannah. Or that place where you can go in your head that you don’t get to go so often. She stops to think of all the ways beauty has been a fleeting trend that morphs through time. Then she says, “Beauty is whatever opens your heart.”

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