Josie Maran

The clean beauty guru teaches us how to manifest from her Lake Hollywood home.

By Lindzi Scharf

Photography by Kate Jones

Model turned clean beauty pioneer Josie Maran founded her eponymous skincare and cosmetics line in 2007, long before “eco-chic” was a thing.

“Every makeup artist told me it was impossible to have high-quality products that were good enough for a makeup artist and still healthy for the people and planet,” Maran says, stretched out across a pink couch in her Lake Hollywood home. “I was like, ‘Thanks for saying no, it’s impossible, and now I’m going to say yes, it is possible, and I’m going to prove you wrong.’ It was like, ‘I need this to happen for me. I need this to happen for other people. Why isn’t this out there?’ So I went on a mission and invested all of my own money.” 

In launching her line, Maran hoped to transform the beauty industry’s approach. Fourteen years later, the beauty biz is finally catching up. “The new norm is to be clean and green,” she says. “Sustainability is totally taking off and people care. Consumers, customers, and beauty lovers really want that as part of the deal.”

MODEL CITIZEN

Maran was introduced to cosmetics at an early age. Growing up in Northern California, as a preteen the beauty mogul saw a Maybelline commercial on television. She recalls thinking, “‘I want to do that.’ I had no idea about makeup. I had no idea about modeling. I had no idea who Christy Turlington was. I had no idea what New York was really. I was just like, ‘That’s cool.’ Every night, I went to bed and I crossed my fingers and prayed to be the Maybelline girl.” 

She started modeling locally when she was twelve and moved to Los Angeles at eighteen. “Holly-weird is what I thought at first when I got here,” she says, glancing out a window within her home. “I am looking at the Hollywood sign — which is so trippy — as I [say] this. Come here, look.” She points at the Hollywood sign, which is in large view from her kitchen window. “I definitely had the stigma of L.A. that it was superficial and fake and cheesy, but it turns out that there are a lot of people here just trying to live their dreams. I found a lot of really interesting people just trying to go for it and figure out who they are.”

Maran was among them. At one point, she starred in a Backstreet Boys music video and played in a band with Nicole Richie. While it was a time of great creativity, Maran also acknowledges, “You just have to know how to navigate [Los Angeles] because I was a cute little girl and there were lots of old gross dudes.” She laughs. “It was a good lesson. It was good to learn about what not to do and what to do.”

Her life forever changed when her childhood aspirations came to fruition at 18. Maran remembers, “My agent called me and was like, ‘You have an audition for Maybelline,’ and I was like, ‘This is the moment. Wow. It’s all coming together.’ Of course, I was extremely nervous. This was, like, the dream. I knew this was my path to do my work in the world. I realized in that moment that I got the Maybelline gig that I was super powerful and I could create whatever I wanted if I focused on it. That was an empowering moment in my life.”

THE POWER OF SPELL-ING

Maran moved to New York and worked with the beauty giant for ten years. Her experience with Maybelline is what led to her belief in manifestation. “I’m like a sorcerer,” she insists. “I can create very clearly and I have. I’ve taken that seriously in my life. I’m into manifesting. It’s powerful. Our being wants to create and grow and keep finding joy. You just keep sifting through life and the more ‘in-joying’ it — like ‘in joy’ — you are, the more it starts to come. I was eighteen when that whole epiphany happened.”

After booking a number of high-profile modeling jobs in New York, Maran eventually moved back to the West Coast to pursue acting. Around 2004, she journaled that she wanted to work with Martin Scorsese. “My dream to become an actress was from watching ‘Taxi Driver,’” she says, noting that shortly after, her agent called with an audition for “The Aviator” opposite Leonardo DiCaprio. She booked the part. “I was like, ‘Oh god. This shit is really powerful.’ I’m now at the place where I can write it and it pretty much happens.”

Maran writes her daily goals and thoughts into a “The Artist’s Way” journal. She calls her morning pages the act of “spell-ing like a witch.” Maran says, “The universe can only read your handwriting. It can’t read your mind. You have to put it on paper with your handwriting and spell.” Asked if she’s ever written something that hasn’t come to fruition, Maran insists, “I don’t think so…”

MAN-IFESTING MR. RIGHT

She credits her meet-cute with husband David Belle to the act of “spell-ing.”

“I broke my own rule,” she admits. “I wrote it in my phone. I wrote the funniest title for it…” She digs through her phone looking for what she wrote as she explains, “I did not want to be in a relationship until I met this older woman and her husband. I was asking them, ‘How do you be in a good relationship for a long time?’ They’ve been together for 50 years. I was single and I was happy to be single, but I thought, ‘How do you do it?’ I’m always so curious. How do you actually stay in love and create a long relationship? The woman was like, ‘You’ve got to make a list of the qualities of the person you’re trying to find.’ She helped me — right then — make a list.”

Maran continues looking through her phone for several minutes while sharing that she hasn’t revisited the list in a year or two.

“Here it is!” She reads the title aloud: “Good traits in a human that I’m close to.”

Maran laughs. “That’s how badly I did not want to be in a relationship.” She pauses. “But obviously, I secretly did because I manifested this. So this is the list that happened ten days before this dude showed up.”

She rattles off the list she’d written down: “Kind. Generous. Intellectual. Hot.’ I have hot on there. ‘Someone accomplished. Sense of humor. Doing good/goodness. Gratitude. Trust in the universe and trust in yourself. Fun!!! Spiritual depth. Character/integrity. Imaginative. Someone who has the info before making a decision. Doesn’t rain on my parade.’ That’s a big one. ‘Motivate me. Support me. Or get the fuck out of my way. Their energy. What’s the energy that I want around me? Really good vibes. Open, positive, compassionate, hopeful, fun.’ And he literally showed up on my doorstep.” 

Wait, what? On her doorstep? “One of my good friends happens to be good friends with him and I think she must have gotten that call energetically,” Maran says, explaining her friend had been hanging out with Belle at his home in Long Island when they decided to drive to Maran’s Pennsylvania home.

They texted they were headed over. “I saved the text,” she says. “I was like, ‘Who is this guy? Did you used to sleep with him? Are you bringing him for you?’ She was like, ‘No, no, no, no.’ I was so mad at her. I was like, ‘Wait a minute. This is a total setup.’”

DOWN THE AISLE

Maran and Belle were married one year later to the day at the beauty guru’s Pennsylvania home. “We had a sunrise to moon-down — a full moon — party. A 28-hours wedding outside on the farm,” she shares. “It was so amazingly beautiful, magical, wonderful, and we’re living happily ever after.”

Despite being in a relationship for many years with her former partner Ali Alborzi, whom she often previously referred to as her husband, Maran says she was never actually married before. “My whole life I was like, ‘I’m never getting married,’” she says. “Joni Mitchell has a song, like, ‘Don’t need no piece of paper from the city hall.’” She continues crooning the bluesy song. “’Keeping us tied and true.’ I was like, ‘I never want that. I want every day to be a choice.’ When I met Mr. Belle, it clicked in differently.” 

“It just felt right,” she adds. “I was on Jimmy Kimmel and lots of talk shows saying, ‘I will never get married. Call me if you hear that I’m getting married and tell me not to.’ I denounced it. Really loudly. ... And then I got married so fast and this all worked out. By the way, I might have married him for his last name, since I am in the beauty industry. I call him Mr. Belle and I’m Mrs. Belle now.”

Maran has, however, always known she wanted to be a mother. “At a young age, I was like, ‘I will have a baby at 27,’ and I did,” she says. “I got pregnant when I was 27 and totally followed that [path].” Maran and Belle’s families combined forces in 2018. “He has two kids and I have two kids; so we have four kids and we call it ReBelle. Like a ‘rebel.’ We call ourselves the ‘ReBelle Six.’”

QUARANTINE QUANDARY 

Maran and her husband were in Paris when the pandemic first unfolded. They had temporarily moved to town for her stepson’s last several months of high school. Because they were stuck in French territory, they decided to quarantine in St. Barts. “We got on the plane in Paris,” she says. “They were like, ‘This is the last flight ever going out. There are no flights coming in. There are no flights going out. Are you sure you want to get on?’ …. We got to St. Barts and we were in heaven. We fell in love with the island. We just recently bought a house there.”

While Maran used to reside in Pennsylvania due to its close proximity to the QVC studio where she’s a regular, she now has the luxury of working from anywhere. “Since the pandemic, QVC shut down their studio and I’ve been shooting QVC shows literally from my bed in St. Barts,” she says. “They called it Josie Island because I was in the Caribbean the whole time. They were like, ‘Show us the beach.’ I was like, ‘There goes a sailboat. Can you see it right now?’ I was selling millions of dollars [worth of product] while I was on the beach.”

Maran is now splitting time between her Los Angeles home and her new property in St. Barts. “We go back and forth,” she explains. “I have two daughters in L.A. He has a daughter in New York and a son in Paris, so we are making everyone come to us in St. Barts. Going to QVC and spending a lot of time there was not the quality of life for my children and for my family. I was like, ‘Now I literally can shoot it from wherever I am,’ and I chose to be in the Caribbean.”

In order to make the arrangement work, Maran and her husband built makeshift studios in both homes. “We just finished this,” she says, walking down the stairway into her L.A. home’s garage, which is now filled with two cameras and several lights. “My husband, thank God for him,” she says. “He helped me do all of this. QVC literally calls and Skypes and then all the lights go on. It’s this whole Josie world now and they’re so happy. The customers are happy, too, because they get to come into my world. It feels so much homier.”

SOUL SEARCHING

Maran is already looking ahead and says the pandemic led to quite a bit of self-reflection. “It made me want to make everything in my life as meaningful and joyful as possible,” she says. “It’s reevaluating everything. … For a minute there, [it felt like] we all didn’t know how much more time we had, so it kind of put us all in that deathbed moment where you’re like, ‘What do I really want to do with my life? And what do I want to leave behind?’ My mom always taught me, ‘Wherever you go, leave it better than how you found it.’ I think that’s my mission now — with everything I do — it’s about leaving it better than I found it.” 

Maran credits her family with contributing to her commitment to sustainability. “I come from a legacy of what I call spunky mothafucka women who cared a lot about the world,” she says. “The first memory I have as a child is, ‘I want to change the world.’ It was deeply in my DNA. It was my way. It’s my culture. It’s my way of thinking, my way of seeing.” 

While she was growing up, her grandmother had breast cancer, while her mother has long battled chronic fatigue syndrome. As a result, Maran was raised to pay close attention to the products she consumed. “We were super careful about chemicals and fragrances,” she explains. “We didn’t have any plastic in our house.” 

During quarantine, Maran says — for the first time in years — she found herself questioning: “Who am I? What turns me on? Where is my joy? Where’s that juicy/yummy place? I’ve seen so much magic happen when I’m in that joyful space. … The personal work I do bleeds into everything I do. The more inspired I am by whatever inner growth, the more it helps build a great organization and culture. Everybody is much more alive and juicy if I’m happy.”

Maran acknowledges there been challenges throughout her entrepreneurial journey, but says she has learned, “Challenges are exciting places to grow from.” For her, that meant finding “the confidence to level up.” She explains, “I was having a moment with my brand [where I] was losing the passion, losing the fire. The clean and green thing was being done and it was like, ‘I don’t feel like I’m doing anything special anymore.’ I was kind of bored. … For a few years, I was like, ‘So, now what? What do I do?’ I felt like I’d done it. My energy comes from what’s next. What do we create next? What’s the next move of the dial? What’s the next disruption? Like, how do we actually evolve?’”

Maran says the feeling created a sense of “insecurity around going for it” and admits she had to look inward to find “the confidence to attract good people to support me” in order to “level up the talent.” “It took a minute,” she says, “to build the confidence and the courage to say, ‘Yes, I am worthy. I am valuable. I have something special. Will you support me?’”

FINDING HER ON-CAMERA PERSONA

Similarly, Maran says, it took time to develop confidence in front of the camera — even though she’d had plenty of experience as both a model and actress. “When I first went on QVC, I totally bombed,” she remembers. “I was just me as a nervous little girl.” After learning the ropes, Maran took a page out of Beyonce’s book and invented an alter ego. “Beyoncé calls herself Sasha Fierce — it’s her performing personality,” Maran says, explaining she learned to create her own alter ego for QVC appearances. “I call it my Sasha Fierce. I usually have big hair. I say, ‘Big hair equals big sales.’ I wear sparkly dresses and I’m a showgirl. You’re putting on a show. You’re still 100 percent authentic to yourself. It just takes on different energies.”

She also fine-tuned her approach. “I figured out the right product to go on with,” she says. “Argan oil is my special thing. I told the story and I found my show self. I was totally spunky. I’ve been doing that now for eleven years.”

While Maran never officially abandoned acting or modeling, she admits she prefers to put her creative energy toward her own brand. “The Josie juice is not there,” she says. “I loved acting school where you could actually get into the art of acting, but on movie sets, it’s like, ‘Stop. Cut.’ I never got into the groove of it and the creativity of it. It was a lot of hurry up and wait.”

She feels similarly about modeling for other brands coupled with an additional challenge. “I have strict rules on what I model for — in terms of values,” she explains. “It just became easier to not step into other brands’ worlds and value systems. If it’s a cool collaboration, then I would totally do it, but after a while, I also didn’t need to model for other people. I wanted to concentrate on my thing.”

BOLD AMBITION

“It’s interesting how life unfolds,” Maran says, explaining her ambition has grown over the fourteen years since her company was first founded. “Even this morning, I was thinking about how when I started the company, I would tell everyone, ‘I’m going to change the world with lipstick,’ and that is the goal — however long that takes.” But she also admits to having had an additional goal along the way. “At a certain level, I think any beauty founder is curious and wants Estee Lauder to want them and then to be [purchased and be a] part of that crew of brands and to have that experience of being wanted by Estee Lauder or L’Oreal and what it’s like to actually like to be part of the big boys.”

However, like any entrepreneur or human being, her ambition has since evolved. “I’m in a new place,” she says. “It’s not that I’m not interested in that at all, but it’s just not in me anymore — that curiosity. This next evolution is settling into loving my work and loving the industry and really mothering it in a way that’s like, ‘What do you need? What will nurture you? What will help you grow?’” She hopes to help the beauty industry as a whole find its meaning and purpose.

“From the pandemic, we’re changed,” she says. “We want different things. We care about different things. The planet is in a very different state — the politics, the social world — everything is different and there’s an urgency that’s different than fourteen years ago when I started. It was like, ‘Let’s protect the planet. Let’s protect the people.’ Now it’s, ‘Let’s save the planet. Let’s save the people.’” 

WHAT THAT LOOKS LIKE

“I’m in a beautiful place right now with some amazing people,” she says, explaining that she and her team are in the midst of “strategizing and reimagining the brand” in order to “help empower people to become activists in their own life for whatever they care about and also empower them to start loving themselves more — trying to find ways to activate love, self-love, and self-joy.” 

As for what that will manifest into, Maran says, “I can’t give away too much,” but she says that she’ll start unveiling Josie Maran 2.0 sometime in 2022. “It’s been about going in and figuring out the true essence, the DNA, of me and this brand. I was so young [when I started]. I launched the brand when I was twenty-nine and started building it when I was twenty-five. I’d never run anything before. Now I’m the CEO, marketer, designer, product developer — I’ve done everything and so after 14 years to be able to go back down to the essence and say, ‘What is actually here?’ With all the knowledge and wisdom plus building an amazing team to help support it — what could now come of it?”

Given her previous successes with “spell-ing,” the possibilities are endless.

HOW SHE LIVES…

“I moved here for the view,” Maran says, looking out at the Hollywood Reservoir and Santa Monica Mountains. “Dreams do come true and I make them happen.”

THE ARTISTS WAY

“The Artist’s Way” by Julia Cameron has had a huge impact on Maran. “It’s a twelve-week program of personal work,” she explains. “We are all creators, so how do you create? What do you want to create? It’s learning about your own creative side and creative skills and creative power. With ‘The Artist’s Way,’ you do that program, but you also do three pages. They’re called morning pages. I solely use their journals. You do three pages in the morning, right when you wake up, you can write whatever you want in your morning pages — like ‘fuck, fuck, fuck,’ whatever.” She’s been writing in the program’s journals since she was twenty years old. “I have so many ‘Artist’s Way’ journals,” she says. “Twenty-two years [worth]. I have lots of houses, so all the journals aren’t here.”

ZEN MOMENTS

“I spend a lot of time here,” she explains. “I meditate here in the morning. I write here in the morning and this is my little office.”

HER STYLE

“This is my uniform,” she says, clad in a bohemian dress, while going through her various closets. “I’m very into vintage dresses because they’re so easy.” 

HER CLOSET

“We have cut offs and shirt life and then we have slip life and then we have bathrobe life,” says, referencing one of a handful of closets. Maran has a St. Barts closet, an everyday closet, and a QVC closet — organized based on her various personas, moods, and locations. “It doesn’t normally look like this,” she admits. “I had a closet organizer over yesterday.” 

THE SASHA FIERCE SECTION

She points to one closet filled with sparkly dresses. “This is the Sasha Fierce section,” she says, sharing she worked with the organizer to purge pieces that no longer served a purpose. “I gave away so many different parts of myself,” she says of the various dresses and wardrobe items that now sit in giveaway. “I was like, ‘Letting it go. Letting it go. Letting go.’ I don’t know if you saw, but in the garage, there were like 20 boxes and it’s all clothes. My mom won’t let me give it away. She wants to take it and then give it to all of our friends to make sure they get the first dibs because it’s [nice clothing]. I’ve been scouring the earth for 20 years.” 

A VALENTINE’S NOTE

A note from Mr. Belle to Maran (aka Mrs. Belle) from a recent Valentine’s Day together. “It’s this unconditional love,” she says of their relationship, adding that it’s no different than the love her family had for her growing up. Her wedding made her realize the power of commemorating their relationship. “When you do that ceremony, it’s like, ‘Now my family loves him unconditionally. His family loves me unconditionally,’ and we’re family. It’s a family thing.’”

ENGAGEMENT RING

“My engagement ring was six diamonds; one for each of us,” Maran shares. “This is our little ReBelle Six family. When one is on the side, I’m like, ‘Uh oh. This one is straggling. What’s going on? I better call them. Like what’s up with you?’”

IN THE KITCHEN

“I married my husband Mr. Belle for his name and his chef-ism,” she jokes. “He’s an amazing cook. He specializes in pasta. He’s not officially a chef at all, but he’s really into cooking and flavor. Like today, we’re having a taco party for Cinco de Mayo. I was like, ‘We can order tacos.’ He’s like, ‘Are you kidding me?’ He’s going to make all different salsas. He’s going to totally get into it. We’re going to grill some yummy eggplant, peppers, and corn.” 

RECIPE BOOK

“This is a really good book,” Maran says of chef Yotam Ottolenghi’s Flavor cookbook. “Every recipe is amazing.” Food is an important part of Maran’s life. “It’s a celebration,” she says. “Food is like love. Like water for chocolate, you put love into it and everyone feels alive. It unites and adds life to people.” She’s also taken inspiration from the kitchen for her various beauty products. “It all pretty much comes from food,” she says. “My bestsellers are oil, butters, and milks. I’m like a baker in the beauty industry.” She laughs. “I’m totally not a baker in real life, but with beauty, I like to bake.”

HOMEMADE BUTTER

Maran has one sweet specialty. “I like to make homemade butter,” she says. “I’m obsessed. You get a jar, you get heavy cream, and you just shake-shake-shake it until it separates from buttermilk to the fat — the butter on the top. You take the butter on the top and you can use the buttermilk for frying chicken or buttermilk pancakes. Butter has a bad wrap, but if it’s homemade, it’s good fat.” She suggests mixing different herbs, flowers, and fruits for a variety of butters. “Put it in a jar and give it to someone as a gift — it’s literally the happiest moment.”

HER PRODUCT SHELF

“I design for myself,” Maran says, explaining that she also listens to feedback from customers on QVC and via social media. “New questions come as I get older and I experience more. This whole retinol pink party happened because five years ago, I was thirty-seven, and I was like, ‘I’m going to need to go next level, but I refuse to use the retinol that’s on the market because [of reported] birth defects.’ I was like, ‘We need to figure out a new way to make retinol a natural and healthy way.’ Then we figured it out from a pink lagoon in Australia, which is full of beta carotene, a natural source of vitamin A. It’s like, ‘Retinol, the gold standard, but what if we did it in a healthy way?’”

NEW INNOVATIONS

“We design ten new innovations a year,” she says of creating products like the 72-Hour Hydrating Treatment Mist. “That takes about two to three years to create. I’m finishing twenty-two to twenty-three — just designing and inventing products and technologies and ways to make skin really healthy. I come up with different ideas and then my team goes into figuring out how to make it and then we go through many rounds of that product iteration.”

PURE ARGAN MILK

“Milk comes from breastfeeding my daughter,” she says. “I invented it while I was breastfeeding. I was like, ‘She’s literally just on my milk and getting so fat and big and juicy.’ I was like, ‘How is milk doing that?’ Milk is oil and fat and I happen to have the best fat on the planet — argan oil — which is nature’s richest source of essential fatty acids. So I was like, ‘Let’s make a real milk and milk up the skin.’ This is a next-level product. It totally transforms your skin cells.”

SAVE THE HUMANS

“I have a sign that says ‘Save the humans,’” she says. “I got it on Haight-Ashbury five or ten years ago. I was like, ‘That is what’s happening. We’re in an urgent state.’ I want to mother and love and support and help people go to the next level in a loving way.”

SPARKLING WATER MAKER

“I’m shipping this to St. Barts,” she says, referencing SodaStream’s sparkling water maker. “This is one of the biggest eco tools you can add into your life. It bubbles your water. Do you know how heavy water is to ship around? If you live in a place where you can get your own purified water from your tap, bubble it here. I’m addicted to bubbly water. If you can bubble your own, do you know how much energy you save on packaging and shipping and carbon in the world? This is game changing.”

INSTRUMENTS

“This is our ReBelle Six marching band,” she says, referencing various instruments set out by her front door and hats that sit atop her piano. Maran says they remain there for her family’s everyday use, but that she also has on them on hand for musician friends so that “when they come they can put on a hat and play some instruments. It makes for a good party.”