Great Women behind Great Brands: Katja Rosasco, Founder of Meishai

What if just looking at your hair care products would make you feel more calm and relaxed?
Today Katja, Founder of the luxury hair care brand Meishai, shares with us the mission behind her brand, her personal story towards natural beauty and wellbeing and why sometimes life stops us when we need it the most.

“To have time, for yourself, for someone else, for life - is for sure the most luxurious thing to have.”

Katja Rosasco

Let's start with our favourite question. Katja, when do you feel most beautiful?

When I’m living life true to my values, I feel most beautiful inside and out.

When it comes to hair care it feels like we need to decide between a product that contains no harmful substances and one that works. You set out to change that. Tell us a little bit about your brand and the mission behind Meishai.

Exactly! Meishai is high-end haircare, that meets the Asthma Allergy Nordic certification. Two worlds that have been separated for a long time. One you see at your professional hairdresser and in high-end stores, the other you see at your pharmacy. For 13 years I have worked as a hairstylist and at the same time lived my entire life with allergy. It has been difficult even for me, to navigate in a world full of wonderful products I couldn’t use myself. I always had to compromise on my own hair care routine and buy my ‘not so caring’ products at my local pharmacy. But even though I have allergy and I’m hypersensitive, I’m a woman who appreciates quality, a beautiful design and love to see the products in my bathroom, thinking - OH YES! - and not, “oh this is for me due to my allergy”. So I decided to combine the two worlds. A new way of thinking, creating and presenting haircare. The mission itself was to provide quality high-end haircare for those with allergy and sensitivity, those who just got pregnant, for the family, and for everyone else who wants to avoid developing allergies without compromising on quality and design.

How was your journey towards natural beauty and wellbeing? Why is this topic special to you?

Throughout my career as hairstylist I have styled and done hair on so many beautiful souls, but unfortunately not all of them see their beauty. It has therefore always been as much about helping my clients to find themselves, to fall a bit more in love with who they are and what they have - as about me making their hair beautiful. For decades our insecurities have been exploited in marketing. Your hair is not good enough, your skin is not perfect enough, you are not enough, but you can be - if you buy this and this and this. Sadly I do believe these words stuck with us all, more than we’d like to admit. It has made us so good at looking at all the things we don’t like about ourselves, all the things we would like to change. Even in life we look more on the things missing than looking at all there is. I’m a “product” of these decades. So in 2018 I decided to start a journey, with who I today would call my life mentor. He guided me through a long journey of finding home in myself, getting to know who I was and why I was here, accepting it all, and then slowly learning to love myself and free myself from all the ‘hidden rules’ in life. For me this is now a life-long journey, but I am finally ready to share it and the best way I know how, is through my passion for hair and beauty. I hope every time our customers use or see Meishai, they will be reminded that they are enough, they are beautiful, and that life is not a race, but rather an opportunity to experience life, right here right now.

What is your favourite Meishai product?

This I can’t - I love all of them too much.:)

As a founder life can get pretty busy. How do you navigate through stressful times?

A real lifesaver for me is to meditate every morning, check in with myself. Then I stretch my body and write in my journal - all before screen time and work. But I want to be completely honest - I’m still trying to find a good balance. Sometimes I manage and other times I don’t. Take my life right in this moment - I am in an extremely busy period of my life, both private and in business. I have been running and running knowing it was too much, but this time I couldn’t stop somehow. So life stopped me. A week ago I fell and had myself a small concussion (luckily small). And just like that I had to cancel everything and take care of myself. I think we have to remind ourselves that we are humans - we will fail and “fuck up” sometimes - but I don’t see this as a “bad” thing - as long as we learn and take our lesson with us.

How does your hair- and skincare routine look like?

You might be surprised how simple my beauty routine is. I have always had a big love for less is more (as you can probably see in how we created Meishai). Have less, but the good stuff.

My hair routine: I take my vitamins and I use Meishai - 3 steps, shampoo for cleaning, treatment for repairing my spilt ends, strengthen and give moisture from within, finished with conditioner to close and protect my hair. I wash my hair 1-2 times per week and give it a treatment every other week. And makes sure to get a good haircut every 3-4 months.

My skincare routine: I take collagen every morning. I use coconut oil to rinse off my makeup, wipe it off - and then I use La Roche-Posay ‘Toleriane’ skincare series.

What's your no.1 advice for healthy and vibrant hair?

Invest in good hair products. There is a huge difference to feel. You don’t need a lot but you need the right ones and the right knowledge. By buying better quality you will also notice that you buy fewer - this is also beneficial to our planet. That’s the mindset behind Meishai: 3 steps for a healthy haircare routine. Why make it more complicated than it needs to be?

How can we develop a more loving relationship with our hair?

Our hair reacts a lot more than we think to how we feel. So we start with making sure we have good relationship to ourselves. I think we need to learn to unlearn these ”beauty rules”, that our hair needs to look a specific way to look right. Truth is there are no rules, only the ones we create ourselves. Hear this from me, your hair is beautiful - because your hair is a part of you. Think about this: No one in this world is like you or looks like you - embrace yourself!

What does luxury mean to you?

Time is for me one of the most luxurious things to have. We live in a time where no one feels like they have enough time, always on the run or feeling behind or guilty for not getting “everything” done. So to have time, for yourself, for someone else, for life - is for sure the most luxurious thing to have.

What are you currently reading?

Thinking fast and slow by Daniel Kahneman.