With a client list that includes fashion and beauty professionals, actors, music moguls and models, Dr Rosemarie Ingleton has risen to the top of the heap in the field of dermatology in New York.

The University of Maryland Medical School alum, who grew up in Pembroke Hall and lists dance icons the late Professor Rex Nettleford and Patsy Ricketts as idols, was recently dubbed by Glamour magazine as a ‘rock star derm’. Her skin glowing, she tells SO that she was simply an artistic girl from Jamaica who was determined to accomplish her goals. “All along I had goal: I wanted to be a physician. My father had put the decision in my head when I was seven or eight years old, when he started calling me ‘Dr Ingleton’, and to me it had a nice ring to it. I mean, we didn’t have any physicians in my family, and I had no real role models to look up to as examples of what it meant to be a physician other than our family doctor, but it’s what I wanted to be.”

Though she excelled in both math and the sciences while at Wolmer’s Girls, she nevertheless realised she was irresistibly drawn to the arts, which she’d been involved with from the age of seven, when she began training at the Jamaica School of Dance. She would later become a junior member of the National Dance Theatre Company (NDTC).

“When I came to the United States and started college (New York University),” she says, “I thought I could do the same thing that I did in Jamaica — dabble in the arts and continue with my preparation to do medicine. But it became strenuous because the competition level here is beyond anything I had ever experienced.” She elaborates: “It’s one thing to compete with brilliant Jamaicans. Here, you are competing with the world.”

Indeed, this realisation led her to make a hard choice, and eventually her ambition to become a doctor won and dance took a back seat.

“Dermatology found me when I was about to graduate from medical school,” she informs. No doubt due to her artistic eye and her talent for seeing “all things beautiful”, she quickly discovered that dermatology would be the perfect blend of art and science.

The rest, as they say, is history.

Over the years she has become a fixture on the New York social scene, bolstered by her many TV appearances on The Today Show, The Doctors, What Not To Wear, Dateline, and in print publications such as Essence and InStyle magazines.

With a laugh Dr Ingleton says of the recent ‘rock star’ nod in Glamour, her Jamaican accent shining through, “Yeah. That’s when I knew I really made it.”

That’s no idle boast. The 48-year-old married mother of two young boys has successfully maintained a very busy multicultural practice in Manhattan. In addition to which she still finds time to dance, and is also currently on the board of directors of Complexions Contemporary Ballet, an offspring company of the legendary Alvin Ailey.

When asked how she balances it all, she answers candidly, “I have a great support system.” This reinforcement includes a caregiver for her children, who has been with her for 12 years, her husband and her mother, who also lives with her at her Brooklyn brownstone. “My mother is my Rock of Gibraltar. I was able to finance my education in the US and nurture my dream to become a doctor because my mom worked tirelessly as a full-time nanny to a wealthy Iraqi family. She ensured that even though I was a girl of limited working-class means, I got everything I needed to roll with the big boys, and shoot for the stars,” she says.

Acknowledging how proud her family and she herself is of her accomplishments she adds, “What I came to America to do, I am doing.”

— Debra Edwards