I first heard about Rita Hazan while listening to a beauty podcast. Walking along the street, half listening, half lost in my own thoughts, I suddenly heard “I used to wax myself with homemade wax in my grandmother’s kitchen”. This was followed up by “well, I’m an Egyptian Jew so I’m hairy.”
Who was this hairy Jew? Well, Rita Hazan is Beyoncé’s hairdresser. And Mariah Carey’s, and JLo’s, and Jennifer Lawrence’s too.
Naturally, I contacted her and asked for an interview. And Hazan, 44, was quite excited, telling me from New York: “I never did an interview for a Jewish chronicle, I love it.”
We agree that hair is an important issue for Jewish women: “It’s all about our hair and it’s so difficult too. Jew hair, Jew fro.”
She’s a fast-talking New Yorker, with the thickest New York accent I’ve heard outside of TV shows. As we talk I imagine her flicking her hair and chewing gum.
Hazan started off in the hair business at a young age, in her grandmother’s kitchen. “I’m first generation American; my mum and dad and grandparents were all born in Egypt. My grandmother — I don’t know if it’s an Egyptian thing, it’s in the blood — she was always into beauty. She is 86 now and she still wears black eyeliner; she has to always have it on.
“So, long story short, she was always into beauty and she made homemade wax like they used to do in Egypt and she used to wax us growing up.
“You know, being Egyptian and Jewish [we were] pretty hairy so I think it was always just part of our culture to do beauty treatments, even if we didn’t know we were doing them.”
The ‘we’ covers Hazan, her mum, her sister and two brothers. They’re all still close, getting together on Fridays “no matter how busy we are” for family dinners that sound like a New York Jewish sitcom. “My husband is Ashkenazi. It’s a funny mixture when we all get together — his family speak Yiddish, mine speak Arabic.”
Her grandmother’s kitchen in Brooklyn is a long way from Hazan’s eponymous Fifth Avenue salon. And family waxing sessions are far from the haircut that really threw her into the celebrity limelight — Jennifer Lopez’s first blonde highlights. But Hazan credits her success to the lessons she learnt there.
“My grandmother played a big role in me being interested in beauty. We were very close and when I got older, she used to colour her hair with box dye, and she said ‘Rita, do you want to put this on for me?’ I said, ‘Oh my God, yeah, totally’. So I started putting it on for her and I loved it. And all her friends started coming with their box colour and I started doing it for them. I was 16, 17 and I thought, this is what I want to do. So right after I graduated high school I went straight to beauty school.”
This was Oribe, one of the first luxury hair care brands. “I went there and I wasn’t leaving until I got a job — and I got a job. I was an assistant for five or six years and I really wanted to train beyond perfection because I wanted to be amazing at my craft and I wanted to learn every scenario that could possibly happen so that I was prepared for it.”
This came in handy when she got her big break. “Back in the ’90s it was about chunky hair and I wasn’t really into that. One of the stylists [at Oribe] worked with Mariah Carey and he said she was looking for a new look — she’d just got divorced.” He asked Hazan if she could create a new look for the pop superstar.
“I was in my early 20s and I loved Mariah Carey, so that was kind of incredible. There were no baby steps — it was just ‘go do the biggest pop star in the world’.”
Hazan, who still lives in Manhattan, is now known among her celebrity clients for her imaginative ideas —and it all started with the blonde highlights she gave Mariah Carey, something that had never been done properly on a woman of colour in the spotlight before, and so was generally avoided.
“I don’t think anyone had ever seen her look that fashionable,” jokes Hazan. Jennifer Lopez was new on the celebrity scene and also wanted a new look and, “it just grew from there. So any time anyone wanted to change their look they would always come to me.”
Hazan attributes this early success to a bit of luck — right place, right time — natural talent and hard work, a result of her Jewish upbringing.
“Colourists don’t really travel because it’s hard to bring all your colours, and you don’t know what you’ll have to work with in terms of bathrooms when you get there but I didn’t really care. I said ‘have colour, will travel’. I grew up in a family that owns businesses so it was all about the hustle, whatever you can do close the deal. I think it’s the Jewish blood.”
This hustle is what caught the attention of Beyoncé — or someone in Beyoncé’s team — and resulted in Hazan joining her on tour. But despite her own fame, Hazan says she isn’t “interested in ‘celebrity’.”
“Everybody I work with — it has to be a positive and easy vibe. I’ve turned down requests [where you know] nothing you do is going to be big enough. I’m not really interested in ‘celebrity’ — go to someone else if you want that vibe.” At the end of day, says Hazan, with what seems to be characteristic insouciance — the kind that helps you name superstars amongst your friends — “it’s not that serious, it’s hair colour”.
“I realised over the years that I have a God-given talent for seeing colour in a different way, especially for ethnic women. Making women who have dark hair, blonde is my specialty. I’m Sephardi so I figured it out on myself first!”
For Hazan, a good colour comes down to tone — there are no rules about who can wear what. “For me, colour is more about personality and skin tone, rather than trends.” What’s the key to a good hair colour? “Colour your hair any colour you want, “ she says, “but it should always be healthy.”
Her tips for healthy, beautiful hair —whatever your age — are to not over-colour, “every three months should be enough” and use products for colour-treated hair. Oh, and “everybody’s shampooing their hair wrong” apparently.
Anyone who has dyed their hair will know there’s a point at which the colour fades and becomes a bit dull. This is avoidable, Hazan tells me, by introducing a gloss into your hair cleaning routine (“shampoo, gloss, condition”). She has created a gloss as part of her product line. “If you gloss your hair it will never dip down to that place where your colour is dull because you’re putting back in a little bit of that colour that has faded away.
“Women now look better than they did in their 20s so I don’t believe in ‘cut your hair shorter as you get older’. Show me a woman with hair that’s healthy, who looks old. I don’t think I’ll ever cut my hair short”.
Rita Hazan products are available online or in Selfridges
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