The story of RMS Beauty, the clean makeup line Rose-Marie Swift built from her own kit in 2009. Concealer, luminizers, lip and eye color, and the skin-first extras that sit around them.
RMS Beauty and the Makeup Artist Who Rebuilt Her Own Kit
Rose-Marie Swift did not set out to start a brand. She grew up in Vancouver, the daughter of a fashion designer who taught her to sew in first grade, and built a career doing makeup for magazines, runways and the Victoria's Secret shows. Then she got sick. A lab technician asked whether she worked in the cosmetics industry, because the results looked like those of people who do hair and makeup, and that sent her into the ingredient lists. She launched RMS Beauty in 2009 with four products: the Un Cover-Up, Lip2Cheek, Eye Polish and a lip and skin balm. Her line was simple. Makeup should look like skin, only better, and it should not dry it out. She had been testing blends on models at Victoria's Secret shoots, starting with jojoba oil, long before she launched. The first grid below is her complexion core, made of the concealer, two luminizers and a bronzer, all of them with a point of view about light. Swift coined the word Luminizer, and a cream highlighter is still the thing most people mean when they say RMS.
Lips, cheeks and eyes
Grid two is color, and everything in it is creamy. Lip2Cheek is the original multi-use cream color, and Swift has said she wanted something you could throw in a bag and dab on lips, cheeks or eyes, no rules attached. The Go Nude Lip Pencil is the definer, made with mango and meadowfoam seed oils. Eyelights Cream Eyeshadow is the original, with a subtle metallic sheen, and Cashmere Matte Eyelights is the same cream in a matte-pearl finish. The tip is to use your fingertips. Warmth melts the cream in, and you get a diffused wash instead of a stripe. Dab the eyeshadow in the middle of the lid and blend outward, then press Lip2Cheek on the apples for a flush that matches your mouth.
Around the eyes, under the makeup
Grid three is the rest of the kit, and it leans on eyes and skin. The Straight Line Kohl Eye Pencil is dual-sided, with a sponge tip for a smudged bedroom eye. ReDimension Hydra Eyes Quartet is a gel-to-powder palette of four shades, hand-selected by Swift. SuperNatural Radiance Serum SPF 30 is a sheer tinted serum for under makeup, and ReFresh Eye Brightener is a mineral SPF 30 in a rollerball. What I would skip is piling all four on the same day. The serum and the brightener already brighten, so pick one focus, either a defined eye or a glowing base, and let the other rest. Swift's own rule was less is more, and she said she did not want fifty products weighing people down.
How I would use the kit
There is a reason I trust a makeup artist to make clean makeup. Swift worked backward from real skin on real shoots, and the free-of list on the brand's site, which includes parabens, synthetic fragrance, talc and sulfates, follows from that. Start with the concealer and a luminizer, add one color pot, and you have a face in five minutes. Everything else is a bonus. If you want to keep browsing, I also put together Jung Saem Mool, the Makeup Artist Behind the Cushion and Nars Light Reflecting Foundation and the Makeup Artist Who Started With 12 Lipsticks.
