Celebrating RMS Beauty's Rose-Marie Swift and the power of red blush

Celebrity makeup artist and the organic beauty mogul behind rms beauty, Rose-Marie Swift (pictured above, centre) has been a make-up artist for over 40 years, so when I was given the chance to get up close and personal with her a few years ago I was beyond excited.
Swift’s work has been featured in Vogue (French, Italian, American, Japan China, Russian) W, Harper's Bazaar, I.D., Self Service, V, Allure, Numéro, Marie Claire, Glamour, Interview, and Elle. Her make-up has appeared in ads for the likes of Diane Von Furstenberg, Calvin Klein, Ralph Lauren and Louis Vuitton, and her photographic partners over the years include Mario Sorrenti, Peter Lindbergh, David Simms, Annie Leibovitz, Arthur Elgort, and Patrick Demarchelier. The words “industry legend” have been bandied about, and with good reason.

She visited New Zealand for the first time when we met as a guest of MECCA, who stock her products exclusively Down Under. I spent a morning speaking to her about her unique approach to makeup, which has that ever-elusive “glow” as its end goal, and came away with so many beauty hacks I felt like my brain was going to explode!
All these years later she has become one of my favourite MUAs to follow on TikTok, and I was scrolling down my For You Page in early June I came across a video of Rose-Marie applying a bright red cream blush while waxing lyrical about her days as a makeup artist for Victoria’s Secret. “They had to look very natural. They had a beautiful flush of colour, and a lot of people always think it’s pink, but it wasn’t—it was red," she said as she swirled her finger into one of the brand's truly iconic Lip2Cheek blushes. For many it was most definitely a MOMENT, to put it mildly, and since then the red blush trend has gone seriously viral.

While red blush has always been part of the beauty scene, it often takes a backseat to pinks, oranges, and even berry tones. But leave it to rms beauty’s Rose-Marie Swift to give red its well-deserved moment in the spotlight. The video currently has hundreds of thousands of likes, with hundreds of glowing comments. Now the term “red blush” brings up thousands of videos on TikTok, each with tens of thousands—and in some cases hundreds of thousands—of views.
It's safe to say that beauty connoisseurs across the globe are trying (and loving) the blush contour trend, reimagining how they use their lipsticks, lip liners and blushes and turning them into multi-taskers that grant chiselled cheeks, snatched jawlines and naturally sun-kissed cheeks all in one product. “Flushed cheeks give off a more inviting, approachable demeanour,” says Rose-Marie. “All of us who like to apply makeup are artists at heart, and art is very colourful and creative and blush allows you to have that creative expression. Having that touch of colour on your cheeks brightens your day and gives a sometimes forgotten point of reference to beauty.”
Rose-Marie’s philosophy has always been glowy, healthy skin first, and at the time that she launched the Lip2Cheek formula, blush was all powder—"creams like this didn’t exist, let alone organic, natural formulas like rms. Now, Lip2Cheek has been around for 15 years and it’s still the best because it’s hydrating and the texture is virtually undetectable on the skin—it just looks like a natural flush.”
“RMS Beloved is the cream of the crop,” she says. “It’s the perfect shade of red because it’s neither blue nor yellow based—It’s almost like a neutral, right in the centre of the red spectrum. That’s why it works on everyone!”
“When I was working with the Victoria’s Secret models, I just found that the pink blush was too girly, too feminine. I wanted something with more of a sensual charge, more dynamic and sexual/passionate. Red does exactly that.”

I’ve been playing with the trend to varying degrees over the past few months and yep, I’m smitten. To grab your own pot of Beloved (I sincerely hope you do!) head now to your nearest MECCA.