How Mara Roszak Went From Doing Her Friends' Bat Mitzvah Hair to Styling Emma Stone and Zoe Saldaña for the Oscars

In our long-running series, “How I’m Making It,” we talk to people making a living in the fashion and beauty industries about how they broke in and found success.

Mara Roszak’s entry into hairstyling is a relatable one, especially for those of us who experienced adolescence in the ’90s and early 2000s: At 13, she was a girl on a mission to coax her suddenly puberty-transformed hair into the era’s trending stick-straight styles. “I had this newly kind of frizzy, curly, coarse hair, and it was the ’90s and everything I saw was really straight, shiny hair,” she recalls. “I was very determined as a 13-year-old girl to get my hair to look the way I wanted it to… It took a lot of work to get there, but I used my mom’s tools and learned how to work with the texture that I had to get it to a completely different texture — and really enjoyed that process.” 

From there, Roszak began styling her friends’ hair for special occasions, and eventually convinced her mom to enroll her in cosmetology school at the age of 16. In a less-relatable part of her career journey, she then began working at celebrity hairstylist Chris McMillan’s salon and styling then-budding movie star Sarah Michelle Gellar’s hair at the age of 18. (Her mom had to drop her off for her first gig with Gellar, since she didn’t have her driver’s license yet.)

In the two decades since, Roszak has built a prolific career as a celebrity hairstylist. 

She’s cultivated decades-spanning relationships with clients like Gellar, Emma Stone and Zoe Saldaña (she was behind the hairstyles the latter two wore when they won their Oscars). She’s also worked with Juno Temple, Cara Delevingne, Lily Collins, Mikey Madison, Michelle Yeoh, Natalie Portman, Nicole Kidman, Kristen Wiig, Riley Keough, Margot Robbie, Billie Eilish, Margaret Qualley, Elle Fanning, Hunter Schafer, Zooey Deschanel and more.

In 2021, Roszak launched Roz, a “clean” professional hair-care brand designed to be accessible to non-pros and used on all hair textures. Now offering nine SKUs, Roz launched at Sephora this month and was recently named one of Fast Company‘s most innovative companies of 2025.

Perhaps “prolific” doesn’t even cover it. Ahead, Roszak shares the highlights of her career journey, why she thinks being an introvert worked to her professional advantage, where she finds inspiration and how the industry has changed during her time in it. 

How did you first become interested in hairstyling?

I feel really lucky that I found hair really early on, and it was really through exploring my own. Post-puberty, I ended up having hair that I did not recognize. It completely changed, as hair can, with hormones. My friends and my mom started to recognize that I was really enjoying [styling my hair]. I started to do my friends’ hair before all the bar and bat mitzvahs and birthday parties that we were invited to every weekend. It really brought me out of my shell. [Hairstyling] is very creative, and I was always a very creative child. My mother is a sculptor, and I think doing hairstyling is very similar to sculpture, just hair is the medium. 

I convinced my mom to let me go to beauty school really young; I enrolled at the age of 16. It introduced me to this creative outlet that still love to this day, 22 years later.

Did you know you wanted to get into celebrity hairstyling?

No one in my family comes from that world, so I didn’t know that that was a career option. I ended up meeting a guy in beauty school who was working the front desk at [celebrity hairstylist] Chris McMillan’s salon. He introduced me to Chris when I graduated. I didn’t have a driver’s license yet, and I would have my mom circle the salon at night so we could look at it — it was really my dream [to work there eventually].

I definitely was the youngest in my beauty school, and I think it was clear that I did have a natural talent. So I got a job as an assistant straight out of beauty school at Chris’ salon. Simultaneously, I got called by a family friend who was a publicist, and at the time I had no idea what that job even was or what that meant. She said, ‘Would you be open to going to Sarah Michelle Gellar’s house and giving her a blowout?’ My mom had to drive me there and drop me off, and I went in and I did Sarah’s hair and she ended up hiring me. So I got this job as an assistant at Chris’ salon, and then I would have to take a couple days off to travel with Sarah sometimes. So my career sort of started doing both, working at the salon and doing freelance celebrity work, pretty much straight out of the gate.

I was 18; this was 2003.

What an amazing, exciting time to be working with Chris McMillan and Sarah Michelle Gellar.

Exactly! ‘Buffy the Vampire Slayer’ was huge for my generation. I think it was in its final season, and Sarah was a budding movie star at that point, she was signed up to do all these incredible films. 

Where did your career go from that point, and how did you really build out your celebrity clientele?

It was really through word of mouth. I said yes to everything. I mean, I really was available. I was loving it. This was the first time in my life that I felt really good at something and I was meeting really interesting, amazing, creative people. It was such a welcoming industry. Sarah’s publicist was like, ‘Wow, Sarah really likes her and she’s available.’ They started recommending me to other clients in their firm. 

Did you ever feel intimidated, being so young and working with celebrities? Was there a learning curve?

I felt intimidated a lot of the time. I definitely was a more in introverted, quiet person. But I think that ended up serving me. I was just so scared of embarrassing myself. I was staying quiet, really observing and trying to understand: This is how you work with the photographer. This is how you enter into this situation. There were definitely moments where I felt I was out of my league. But I had such supportive clients and really a supportive community. People love having fresh energy around.

Tell me about then how you built out your clientele and your relationships with celebrity clients.

From Sarah Michelle, I then started working with Halle Berry because her stylist — whose hair I had done, and she had kind of coarser, curlier hair — recommended me. She brought me on my first editorial shoot, I think it was the cover of InStyle, and really advocated for me. I met Zoe [Saldaña] really early on as well. I might’ve been 20 years old at that point. I started working with Emma Stone shortly after that. She was coming out in ‘Superbad,’ and I think that was one of her first films. Then I started working with Mila Kunis around the same time and and it was really, again, through personal relationships. Publicists that I’d met along the way would recommend me for their newer clients that were starting their careers.

You still work with so many of these same celebrities decades later. What is the secret to having that kind of longevity in professional relationships?

I think it’s such an intimate relationship. We’re traveling together and we’re the last people our clients see before they go out and have to do this very public, sometimes very vulnerable thing like a photo shoot or a big red carpet. And I think that this intimacy and friendship sort of grows naturally.

I also think a big piece is being creative partners and really being open to changing course if something isn’t working. We all grow and change and maybe we don’t want to do this type of hairstyling or makeup anymore. So being able to change course and continue to collaborate while remaining really open and flexible is really key. I truly value the relationships, and I think that it’s nice to have consistency with a client because we know each other so well.

Looking back, do you have one specific moment or milestone that you’re proudest of?

I got to do an Interview cover with Emma Stone years ago and work with Craig McDean. Working with photographers like Juergen Teller, David Sims — these are iconic, incredible photographers who have photographed every single person under the sun and have created some of the most iconic images.

For red-carpet moments, [I styled] Emma Stone when she won both of her Oscars; Zoe Saldaña, when she just won hers. It’s so amazing getting to be there for those moments.

How would you describe your creative approach to hair? Where do you find your inspiration?

I’m constantly scouring the internet and saving things, looking at runway shows. The hair looks are usually very much inspired by the clothes [my clients are] wearing and the shapes and silhouettes. Like I said, it’s sort of similar to sculpting where I don’t always go in knowing exactly what I want it to be, but I’m pulling from a shape that I’m seeing on in the dress, and then maybe the back of a bun that I saw on a runway show, and getting inspired by several different things. It’s so fun and it can be very freeform. It really does put me very much in the moment.

Tell me about how you came to create and launch your own hair-care brand, Roz.

I did do a little bit of work as an ambassador for brands years ago, more in the beginning of my career. I learned a lot from doing that about how to talk about product. But it didn’t always feel as authentic as I wanted it to. I very much consider myself an entrepreneur, and always wanted to create my own brand.

It was about finding the time to embark on the journey, which took time. But I also needed the experience — I needed all those years to really refine and identify what products needed to exist.

What was missing from the market that you then set out to create with Roz?

There was nothing in the professional space that had ‘clean’ ingredients that worked at that professional level. More and more of my clients were looking for it, and especially after I got pregnant with my son, I really wanted to change up my routine. That was number one. Number two was, I felt like there was a lot out there, but there wasn’t one product line that I felt like I could really even rely on for curated essentials. Why do I need this product? What does this product do? It felt very confusing to me. I wanted to simplify by only creating products that really needed to exist.

I feel like women in general, in the beauty space, have been spoken to in this harsh, negative way: ‘You need this because you’re aging,’ or, ‘you need this because you’re dry.’ I always saw the beauty in my clients’ hair. I was able to identify it in a way that they couldn’t. I can’t see millions of people in my chair, so how do I convey my expertise, my vision for what I see and know about people’s hair into a bottle and make sure they know that what they have is beautiful? They just need the right products to really bring that out and enhance what is naturally beautiful about their hair.

Where did you start? 

Because this was really a dream of mine, I self-funded — really kind of poured my savings into starting Roz — and was able to start some small distribution. I made sure that it was in the hands of all of my peers, all of my hairstylist community, to get their feedback first because I know what buy-in from a pro really is and what it really means. They are the harshest critics, obviously, as they should be, and clients of course as well.

Then once we launched, I raised [money] from friends and family, probably a year and a half into the brand. That was to develop and produce more products, which I already had going on in the background. 

How are you choosing your retail partners for the brand?

We just launched at Sephora, and they’ve been a dream partner for me for a long time. I truly value how they storytell and brand build. I value their loyalty, their client loyalty, and their perspective. Sephora’s so at the forefront of what’s new and identifying brands that are going to resonate with their client.

What does the future of the brand look like? 

I’m very focused on product innovation, continuing to build the brand with products first and foremost that are professional-grade and ‘clean.’ That takes time. No product is launched before it’s ready; we don’t work on any kind of traditional timelines.

And I’m excited to bring my lab samples to the red carpet work that I’m doing, too, to really put them to the test.

You now have more than 20 years in the industry. How have things changed for hairstylists in that time? And what constants are there?

The nature of the whole industry really has changed. When I started, there were very few female hairdressers working at a very high level with all the big movie stars. It was a predominantly male industry. I am pleased that we have now many more women highlighted and doing such exceptional work.

And there is a lot more opportunity with social media for people to highlight and showcase their work. Before, it was a select few agencies and you would try to get representation through them, but now there’s much more exposure through all these different channels.

I think in recent years we’ve learned how to value [hair dressing]. Through Covid, people were so desperate to get their hair done. People have always valued their hair and their hairdressers, but I don’t know that hairdressers had really accepted or owned their own value… Being of service and giving so much in your career, it can be challenging to give to yourself and know how to value yourself. I think that there’s more ownership of that.

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This interview has been edited and condensed for clarity.

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Source: Fashionista.com