Monaé Everett believes that the time for gatekeeping high-profile glam jobs is over.
The celebrity stylist is a go-to editorial, red carpet, fashion, and special event hairdresser for A-list actors, musicians, influencers, athletes, and TV shows. She’s also a prolific educator and founder of the Monaè Life Academy (and its offshoot, the Celeb Gigs Academy) — and as such, she wants to teach other beauty artists how to book the kind of high-visiblity work she loves doing.
Currently, Everett is on her “Texture Unleashed: Star Styling Simplified” education tour, with a stop at the upcoming International Beauty Show in New York from March 23-25. She founded the Texture Style Awards, and was just named the new spokesperson for Sally Beauty.
“I want to create opportunities for artists to do more, be more, see more, achieve more,” Everett tells American Salon. “I’m here to make things better for newer generations.”
In her years working with celebrities, production teams, photographers, and fashion designers, Everett has seen a lot of beauty artists make mistakes that kill their chances of landing future jobs at that level.
The following are her 7 rules followed by beauty professionals who want to get booked again and again for high-profile gigs.
1 - Be an Extraordinary Artist.
You are assumed to be an amazing hair stylist or makeup artist before you begin trying for this level of clientele. You have to be extraordinary at what you do. You have to know how to break down and put different looks together quickly and professionally.
This is not about Can I create a style? It’s about can I break it down and redo it multiple different ways? Can I find the common denominator in multiple styles throughout the day so that I can easily change them? Do I understand geometry? Do I understand building fundamentals? Do I understand the way different elements work together?
Most of these are not things the average hairstylist encounters when they're styling in a salon.
2 – Learn How to Network.
Success in landing high-profile jobs depends more on networking than anything else. Your job is to network. Your talent comes after that.
Networking as in, making sure that people know you. Which is very different from you knowing people. Everybody knows Beyoncé. But how many people does Beyoncé come up to and say hello to?
So, network. You're going online, you're finding out about events, for example. You're finding out who will be there and then you jump in their DMs on Instagram or — when you really want to be taken seriously — on LinkedIn.
You reach out that way, you start building a virtual folder of people, their successes, the things you like about them, and finding out about their network. Because birds of a feather flock together.
Every photoshoot at bare-bones minimum has to have a photographer, makeup artist, hairstylist, model, and often wardrobe stylist as well. So those.
If you see an amazing hairstylist, start looking at the photographers they're working with, the makeup artists they’re working with.
I have learned that makeup artists and models really look out for each other. Once you get in with makeup artist friends, they're really good at referring you to other people.
Find somebody you work really well with and form a group. That makes it easier to work on more shoots to showcase your talent.
3 – Vibe with Other Artists.
In a photoshoot, you have got to at least get along with the team, and ideally you need to vibe really well with each other and communicate.
You can't have hair fighting makeup. You can't have makeup being super crazy. Your goal is a cohesive look and you need to do what it takes to create that together. There had to be synergy between the hair, the makeup, the wardrobe.
I remember doing a natural beauty shoot. The makeup artist literally put a Zorro mask of makeup across the girl's face. Those photos went nowhere. Absolutely nowhere.
Put your ego down and collaborate. I feel God put me in a situation to work with so many amazingly talented artists, especially women, to learn from them.
You also need to remember that the talent is not the one who hires you, their team is. You need to do your research and get along with them as well.
4 – Remember: They’re Not Your Friend.
I really need people to know their clients are clients. They're never, ever your friends. Even the salon hair stylist needs to understand this. They’re not your friends. And you’ll find that out in many a different way.
A big mistake is not knowing who and how to approach for a job and getting a strike against you before you can even get the job. Something so small that drives me insane is when people DM me — or I watch them walk up to the celebrity — and they’re opening with Hey, love. Hey, doll. Hey, sweetie.
Be professional. You're not that familiar with people. You're not friends.
If you approach people in such a familiar way, they don't know how you will behave in environments that need professionalism.
5 – Set the Tone; Make it Chill.
Your job is not just to do the talent’s hair, but to bring a level of patience and calmness to the situation. This can actually be even more important than the style you're creating for them.
When I started out, I really thought it was all about the getting-ready process. Since that’s your part of it, you think it’s the most important part — and it absolutely is not.
The talent then has to go and perform and that is a whole separate anxiety; that is a whole separate amount of pressure that they are facing.
So you really need to understand you are a tiny yet important piece of a massive puzzle. And remember that your role, in part, is to set the tone for others in the room, for the whole scene.
Because anything can happen. Their dress hasn’t come back from the tailor. Or it just ripped. Or the makeup artist got sick and we have to get a replacement.
All of this means that not only do you have to change and adjust quickly, but you can’t let it rattle you, because you are setting that atmosphere of calmness and professionalism.
6 – Stay Educated. Constantly.
I take classes no less than twice a month, if not more, and that’s a minimum. I literally used to take classes three to five times a week because there is so much more to learn.
I do a lot of business courses. A lot of business mentorship. YouTube and TikTok are great for learning new styles and trends, so they’re valuable, but real, in-person education is vital.
As an educator, I feel anyone in the position to teach needs to be constantly educated themselves. In my classes, I make sure that people have a lot of actionable takeaways at the end.
I am not the educator that you come to for a little massaging of the ego. You come to me, you are going to learn. So that smile is going to quickly turn into the face of a note taker.
7 – Preparation is the Answer to Anxiety.
If you’re styling for a huge event or a fashion show, the stakes are sky-high for your client. Everyone is going to be picking apart their look. And I'm going to be honest, I do get anxiety about that.
What helps me is intense preparation. I study the mood board and the script. I bear down and focus on the exact words that were said to me as to what they want. Then I go into reading between the lines: You said you wanted a short hairstyle, but short can mean a lot of different things to a lot of different people.
I have every single possible tool or product needed to create the look I think they want, but if they didn't mean that, I have multiple variations of it ready to go. I bring my own suggestions and my own ideas.
But here’s the thing: If you come with four cases of stuff, you come across as unprepared because you don’t know how to pare things down, or as unorganized because you had no idea what the agreed-upon looks are.
You can request a dossier on their complete look in advance. This is fairly new. I’ve done 25 Fashion Weeks and we never got the looks ahead of time — because they don’t know if you’re going to share it with other people.
But lately I’ve been getting them two or three days ahead of time, and honestly it’s because Gen Z artists are entering the field. Because they make such a big deal about having time to prepare.
Gen Z demands what they want. I love that. They have emboldened me to ask for these things.
Monaé Everett will be teaching "Backstage Beauty: Celebrity Styling Secrets Every Artist Needs," "Become the Go-To Beauty Pro for High-Paying, High-Profile Gigs!" and "From Salon to Set: Translating Your Skills Into High-Income Beauty Influence" at the International Beauty Show-New York from March 23-25, 2025. Register here.