With a set of pioneering beauty brands that call the city home, and a new Business of Beauty and Fragrance program at SCAD, Savannah is an unexpected center for natural, sustainable innovation.
Why Savannah, Georgia Could Be the Country’s New Clean Beauty Capital
There are no weeping willows in Savannah. The swooping, bending branches that tunnel the streets are mostly oak, draped in swaths of Spanish moss. Before I moved here—a few months after turning 30, searching for somewhere that wasn’t Los Angeles—I always pictured them as weeping willows.
I pictured the cliché, prim and proper women of the South, too, complexions perfected with foundation thicker than a slice of Paula Deen’s famous Brown Sugar Bacon. Would I—a bare-faced beauty journalist from California by way of New Jersey, who’s all but given up cosmetics in an effort to lower my body’s chemical burden—fit in? I pictured the over-the-top politeness (my Southern mother-in-law once sent me a thank you note for a thank you note) and my propensity for four-letter words. I pictured living in a state that came dangerously close to outlawing abortion last year and feeling powerless.
Savannah was my husband’s idea. He went to college in the city twenty-some years ago and loved it; I was skeptical but easily persuaded. I mean, I was ready to leave L.A. I wanted a place to slow down and write a book and afford a front yard. So I packed my things and said my goodbyes—to friends, sure, but also to the Moon Juice on Melrose Place, the Detox Market on 3rd, the Korean spa on Vermont. I doubted Savannah, Georgia could satisfy my craving for clean beauty and cutting-edge wellness in quite the same way.
I was wrong about it all, from the willows to the wellness scene.
I knew it the moment Rose-Marie Swift—65-year-old founder of RMS Beauty, pioneer of the non-toxic movement, professional astrologer—opened the door of her remodeled brownstone in the heart of Savannah’s Historic District. “Honey, L.A.’s not my thing, and my company’s never run out of New York, ever,” Swift told me when we talked pre-pandemic, as she ushered me inside for lunch. “I love it here.”
Swift is from Canada, although she’s traveled all over—Paris, London, Los Angeles, Miami—working as a makeup artist. “I lived in Berlin and Hamburg, I was there when the wall came down,” she recalled, pulling extra-large soup bowls from her kitchen cabinet. “Then, you know, I got sick.”
The story is the stuff of industry legend, but she rehashed the highlights as she heated the broth. After falling ill, Swift had a hair, blood, and urine analysis done. “When I got the tests back they said, ‘Do you work in the cosmetic industry?’ I said, ‘Holy shit, how do you know that?’” The chemicals in her body were more commonly found in beauty products. Swift started researching the toxic effects of conventional cosmetics and launched beautytruth.com in 2004—before the Environmental Working Group’s Skin Deep database, before Goop, before anyone, really, was talking about it.
This story originally appeared on: Vogue - Author:Jessica DeFino
