In the first few minutes of our call, it becomes clear that Mara Roszak—celebrity hairstylist behind the effortless looks of Olivia Wilde, Zoe Saldaña, Hailey Bieber, and Riley Keough and founder of clean hair care brand Rōz—is a beauty minimalist to her core. The words quick, easy, and efficient come up multiple times.
“I have a three-and-a-half year-old, I’m preparing for calls, meetings, going to set…on any given day, I need a quick and easy routine,” Roszak tells Glamour of why it’s important to find versatile and efficacious products. All the better if they’re travel-size and can be applied in the plane or in the car.
Although Roszak says she’s a creature of habit when she finds something that works, she isn’t afraid to try new things—especially if they come recommended by makeup artists she meets on set or if fellow beauty founder friends send her new launches to test. “I’m not the most particular, I want what works and is convenient,” she says. She naturally gravitates toward clean formulas—both for hair and skin—which is something she became conscious of when pregnant four years ago and felt incredibly in tune with her body.
“I really had this natural, almost visceral instinct to want to put cleaner products on my skin and hair. Clean hair care was especially hard to find because you’re working with this mass of strands on your head and you want them to behave a certain way. You can see immediate results with hair, whereas skin care takes a longer time to show a difference.” It’s what inspired her to start Rōz, which debuted in 2021 with a single hero product—the Santa Lucia Styling Oil.
“I work with so many different types of heads, so I need all of my hair products to work across the board,” Roszak says. This philosophy and approach informed what she’s doing with Rōz: developing luxurious, effective formulas based on natural, sustainably sourced ingredients.
“The truth is when you’re using great products, they should work on someone with thick and frizzy hair as well as someone with finer hair,” she says. To prove it, she’ll add her own products to her styling kit for the ultimate test: “Not only do they have to perform on their hair but they also have to perform on the red carpet, which is a lot of pressure.”
Roszak currently splits her time between Los Angeles—where she’s based and co-owns Mare Salon—and wherever one of her A-list clients needs her. When we spoke, she had just come back from Cannes Film Festival, where she was doing hair for Michelle Yeoh, Emma Stone, and Natalie Portman.
With a packed schedule, maintaining beauty rituals is often a challenge. “Time isn’t totally on my side right now at this stage of life,” she jokes. But something Roszak swears by? Washing her hair. “It’s what makes me feel fresh. Before I get on the plane, I wash my hair. I love having a clean scalp when I travel, and when I land it’s usually also the first thing I do. I never want my hair to feel weighed down at the roots.”
