Mara Roszak

Long plagued by her unmanageably frizzy curls, Mara Roszak was 12 years old when she set out to find an aesthetically pleasing solution. Unimpressed by her local Laurel Canyon, California, beauty school’s $10 blow-outs, she took matters into her own hands and mastered a hair-straightening technique that didn’t just impress her peers, but left them begging her to do their hair. While Roszak was shy and introverted as a child, hair styling gave her the confidence to come out of her shell as a preteen. Suddenly, she found herself styling friends’ hair for bat mitzvahs and proms, feeling for the first time like she was good at something.

At age 16, Mara earned her GED and dropped out of high school to enroll in Marinello School of Beauty, which she paid for by working at Starbucks. While her academically-inclined older sister protested, Mara had the blessings of their single mother, whose entrepreneurial spirit and background as a stone sculptor later inspired Mara’s creativity and sculptural approach to hair styling.

Set between a 99-cent store and a Sizzler, beauty school only taught basic styling techniques, Mara was dismayed to discover. However, one of her classmates worked for Chris McMillan, the stylist credited with creating The Rachel hairstyle, and offered an introduction.

Thanks to a personal referral from a publicist dating Mara’s cousin at the time, Mara began working at Chris McMillian Salon as an assistant shortly after graduation. Well before she earned her own styling chair at the salon, the same publicist passed Mara’s name onto her first celebrity client: The A-lister was Sarah Michelle Geller, who had just wrapped up Buffy the Vampire Slayer and desperately needed a last-minute blowout.

Sarah ultimately invited Mara to join her on an international tour, where she was the youngest stylist by far. She met and signed on with an agency that later helped her land styling gigs for publications ranging from Vogue to W, Interview, ELLE, Harper’s Bazaar, Vogue and Self Service, and more, plus advertising campaigns for Dior, Gucci, Kenzo, Puma, Jimmy Choo, Louis Vuitton and Revlon. Since then, Mara has collaborated with renowned photographers including Mario Sorrenti, Craig McDean, Juergen Teller, Annie Leibovitz and Venetia Scott.

After seven years with Chris McMillian Salon, Mara went on to work at Andy Lecompte Salon. It wasn’t until she, her favorite colorist Denis De Souza, and stylist Alex Polillo, stumbled upon a perfectly-located West Hollywood salon space that the trio founded Mare Salon.

Renovated with the help of the architecture and design firm The Archers, Mare Salon opened in 2016 and now staffs 25 colorists and stylists in addition to several assistants, many of which have adopted Mara’s signature habit of storing hair clips in their own manes during blow-outs.

While an impressive roster of household names and opening a salon would easily complete the bucket lists of average hair stylists, Mara had greater aspirations: After 20 years of touching hair of all types in every state and developing a first-hand understanding of which products work, she set out to develop a high-performing line of luxury hair products, beginning with the one she uses on every single client but has never been fully satisfied with: Styling oil.

It took months of testing exclusively on her own hair due to pandemic stay-at-home orders that dried up much of her styling and salon work, but in May 2021, Mara launched RŌZ, a sustainable hair care brand, and its inaugural product Santa Lucia, which was the recipient of Allure’s 2022 Best Beauty Award for clean styling oil. A light-weight, buildable styling hair oil that can be used universally across all hair types, Santa Lucia is named after the mountain range near Big Sur, a nod to a special trip Mara had taken with her husband and the important role that nature plays in centering her creative spirit.

In November 2021, RŌZ launched its second product: A nourishing, restorative hair oil treatment called Willow Glen, which is named after the road that Mara grew up on. In Spring of 2023 she launched The Foundation Shampoo and Conditioner.

Now sold online and in select salons and beauty boutiques across the country and internationally, all RŌZ products are made from organic ingredients and sustainably packaged.

Mara currently lives in Los Angeles with her husband and son. She splits her time between styling celebrity clients and salon patrons, new product development, and parenting her toddler. When she’s not working or shepherding her dogs back indoors, she can be found stepping outside to catch a breath and forage forest treasures, which she arranges obsessively around her home.