The Founder
Functional Biology Skin Therapist
Jamie Leigh is the founder and visionary behind THE LIVING™ Spa + Wellness — a Functional Biology Skin Therapist and pioneer of holistic beauty in the Southeast, known for her nervous-system-led, whole-body approach to healing, beauty, and the deeper intelligence of the human form.
In 2008, Jamie left her hometown of Bethlehem, Pennsylvania for Atlanta, Georgia — drawn by a singular vision to study the skin not as surface, but as a reflection of the body’s inner ecosystem. She earned her license in Esthetics from the prestigious and nationally ranked Atlanta Institute of Aesthetics, completing 1,000 hours of training and graduating with honors in 2009.
One year after graduation, in 2010, she was invited to join the inaugurating team of Exhale Spa — an internationally renowned wellness destination inside the luxurious Loews Hotel in Atlanta. Within six short months of opening, Jamie’s leadership, talent, and innovation earned her the role of Lead Esthetician and Trainer. From onboarding all client service staff, to training licensed professionals on advanced spa services and product knowledge, Jamie’s ability to think on her feet, innovate facial protocols, and refine massage techniques made her one of the most sought-after estheticians in Atlanta — and an integral part of Exhale Spa’s growing reputation.
In 2011, a request arrived that would change the course of Jamie’s career.
A woman from Hungary — newly enrolled in a clinical trial at Emory’s Oncology Treatment Center — was searching for someone who could give her a facial. She spoke barely any English. She was terrified to remove her headscarf and reveal her bald scalp. She had come thousands of miles for treatment, and she needed someone who could meet her with safety, gentleness, and skill.
Jamie took the call.
She had no formal training in oncology esthetics. No protocol to follow. No precedent to lean on. What she had was a deep, unshakable knowing — and she answered it. Led only by divine intuition, Jamie received the woman with quiet hands and steady presence, trusting the wisdom of her body and the guidance she could feel but not yet name.
In that treatment room, holding a stranger from across the world through one of the most vulnerable moments of her life, Jamie understood something the beauty industry had not yet awakened to: immunocompromised individuals were being underserved, misunderstood, and turned away by spas that lacked the training — and the heart — to care for them.
When the service ended, both women wept. And in that moment, Jamie made a quiet promise — that she would find a way to honor every woman like her: to meet her with compassion, with skill, and with the dignity of feeling beautiful through one of the body’s most critical fights.
Jamie has never forgotten her. And to this day, she carries a dream — to one day open a first-of-its-kind Oncology Spa as a non-profit, where every woman walking through cancer can be received the way that woman from Hungary was: with quiet hands, steady presence, and the unwavering belief that beauty belongs to her, too.
Less than a year after that first treatment, Jamie earned her certifications in Oncology Esthetics under Tina Y. McLendon of The Skin Care Therapy Institute and Morág Currin of Oncology Training International — two of the world’s foremost experts in the field. Her oncology training became the foundation of a much larger awakening: an exhaustive deep-dive into the harmful chemicals saturating the beauty industry, their disruption of hormones, gut health, and women’s long-term wellness — and the unspoken connection between conventional skincare and disease.
This was the seed of The Holistic Skin Movement — Jamie’s lifelong commitment to no harm, non-toxic, plant-based, whole-body skincare that she would carry across the next decade, and that would evolve, over time, into the deeper philosophy at the heart of THE LIVING™ today.
In 2014, Jamie scaled back her clinical work at Exhale to make space for motherhood — transitioning into a training role from 2014 through 2016, before resigning to welcome her second daughter.
These years were not a departure from her work — they were a deepening of it. While raising her daughters, Jamie quietly pursued advanced education in holistic skincare, integrative practices, lymphatic systems, energetic anatomy, and the body’s innate intelligence. The corporate spa industry had given her structure. Motherhood, study, and stillness gave her vision.
She emerged with a clear, embodied understanding of what she wanted to create.
On September 1, 2018, Jamie opened MODERN Holistic Skin in Inman Park — the first true holistic skincare studio of its kind in Atlanta and the Southeast.
It was not a spa. It was a sanctuary — a space where every facial ritual, every healing modality, and every product was rooted in plant-based, non-toxic principles and aligned with the wisdom of the whole body. Every client experience was anchored in Jamie’s most potent tool: her hands. Her hand-method technique — refined over nearly a decade — became the heartbeat of the practice.
Six months after opening, MODERN Holistic Skin was featured in The Atlantan magazine [March 2019]. One year after opening, Jamie expanded into Historic Downtown Roswell on September 1, 2019 — where she has operated full-time, building one of Atlanta’s most respected holistic skincare practices, and where THE LIVING™ now lives as the next evolution of her work.
Across nearly two decades of practice, Jamie has come to understand a simple truth: the skin is not separate from the body. It is a mirror.
True radiance does not come from chemicals, machines, or surface intervention. It emerges when the nervous system, lymphatic system, connective tissue, and inner intelligence of the body are supported in harmony.
Her work weaves together the ancient and the advanced — Traditional Chinese Medicine, Manual Lymphatic Drainage, Gua Sha, Facial and Vagus Nerve Reflexology, Connective Tissue Manipulation, Buccal Sculptural Lifting™, Thai Herbal Poultice, Facial Cupping, and energetic healing. Treatments are sculpted with clinical precision and intuitive presence — addressing not just the skin, but stress, stored tension, emotional patterns, and the body’s innate capacity to heal.
Jamie has trained with some of the world’s most renowned, respected, and elite educators in advanced esthetics — bringing clients an experience that is both deeply restorative and profoundly results-driven. Her gifted hands and deep compassion have held countless women through seasons of healing, transition, and renewal — guiding them home to themselves.
At the heart of Jamie’s philosophy is a simple truth:
“Beauty is not something you force —
it is something you restore.”
Every session is designed to regulate the nervous system, release stored tension, awaken cellular renewal, and reveal the body’s natural radiance from the inside out. Her approach is not about quick fixes or external appearances. It is about deep, sustainable transformation — a return to the body’s original design.
“For two decades, I have studied the skin — and through it, I have come to understand the body. My work is not about chasing youth, covering imperfection, or arriving somewhere new. It is about return — return to the nervous system, return to the lymph, return to the connective tissue and the inner intelligence that has always known how to heal. I want to accentuate women, not alter them. This is why I do not align with the Medical Aesthetics world. The skin is an organ — our largest external protector — and it should never be intentionally damaged in the name of beauty. To do so is to participate in the slow demise of women’s health. Real beauty does not live on the surface. It lives in the system beneath. And it is my honor to call it forward, one body at a time — to return each woman, not to someone else, but to herself.”
— Jamie LeighJamie lives in Roswell, Georgia, where she is raising her two daughters — her greatest teachers, and the heartbeat of everything she creates. When she is not with her clients, she can be found on Georgia’s hiking trails, on her yoga mat, gathered around her table with the women she loves, or moving through her community with the same intentional presence she brings to her treatment room.
She continues to pave the way for holistic beauty in the Southeast — and continues to deepen her practice with the same hunger and reverence that began it all.
