Maria Pelo describes herself as “a hair artist, maker, imaginer, traveller, and a lover of all things strange,” and her career reads exactly like that. From fashion weeks and music videos to friends’ kitchens turned impromptu hair labs on some far-flung passion project, she goes, as she puts it, “where the transformation is.” With credits including Marc Jacobs and Cartier, Maria lives by one of her favourite quotes from Cheryl Strayed, “Put yourself in the way of beauty.”
Which is precisely what led her to build Specimen. When Maria was forced to leave London due to a visa issue, she lost her entire creative network overnight, a turning point that would eventually spark something far bigger than herself. Having spent years navigating the same fragmentation in city after city, she decided to build the LinkedIn for the creatives in hair, MUA, and creative production. Specimen is a mobile app with Discord-style group chats organised by city, profession, and shared experience, alongside real-time job requests sent directly to the right people. We chat with Maria to learn more about Specimen and her entrepreneurial journey.
CosmoME: Tell us about Specimen. What features does it offer? Who is it for? What gap are you filling?
Maria: Specimen is a mobile app built for creatives around the world. At its core, it’s about community, conversation, and connection. The app allows users to connect globally, see where creatives are based, and where they’re headed. Users can join Discord-style group chats organised by city, profession, and shared experiences. They can discover or create editorial and passion projects, and jump onto existing sets. Post urgent, last-minute requests that notify the exact creatives needed. The foundation of Specimen is its group chats—spaces like #Paris, #Models, #LFW, #Rates, or #hardday—where creatives can ask questions, share knowledge, and talk sh**. Specimen’s Urgent Requests eliminates the chaos of IG highlights and endless DMs. A post like “Makeup artist needed in Dubai tomorrow” is instantly pushed to the right people—no 24-hour stories required. IYKYK. The gap I’m filling is massive. Our industry is global, fast-moving, and built on trust—yet our connections remain fragmented across platforms never designed for how we actually work. There’s no real LinkedIn for the on-set, entertainment, and backstage world. Specimen is the missing infrastructure.
CosmoME: Can you share details about your founder journey?
Maria: Specimen was born out of movement and loss. Growing up in Kansas, a career in the entertainment or creative world felt impossible. Everything changed when I met my best friend, executive producer, Subby Noleen, and moved to London. While working full-time in marketing, I began doing hair on the side, slowly finding my way into the creative world through her guidance—what started as a side pursuit eventually became my full-time career.
Years later, when I had to leave London due to a visa issue, the creative community I depended on disappeared overnight. Over time, I moved between Berlin, LA, Paris, NYC, and Athens—meeting incredible creatives everywhere, yet facing the same challenge again and again. Our industry moves fast. We move cities. We rely on trust. Yet we’re still dependent on word of mouth, scattered group chats, and systems that were never built for how we actually work.
As a hairstylist with a background in business, I built Specimen for myself first—a way to stay connected across cities. What began as personal quickly became collective.
CosmoME: What is your goal or hope with the app?
Maria: My hope is unity across creatives, across continents. I want Specimen to feel like a cultivated community everywhere it exists: a space where creatives can connect, collaborate, share learnings, support one another, and laugh together. This industry can be incredibly isolating, and it doesn’t have to be. I want to remove the gatekeeping and secrecy that have shaped this industry for too long. If you can see something, you can
become it—but first, you have to be able to see it.
CosmoME: How is Specimen especially impactful for Middle Eastern creatives?
Maria: Too often, people of colour are excluded from rooms, paid less, or made to feel like they don’t belong on sets they worked for years to enter. That isolation is real and it’s debilitating.
We need spaces where we can ask the hard questions openly: How much should we be charging? Why are creatives still being paid 60–90 days out? For many first-generation immigrants and POC, waiting three months for payment isn’t just inconvenient; it’s impossible. In hair especially, outdated practices like “texture teams” are harmful and have no place in our industry. Knowing your worth, how to move up, who to work with, and who to avoid truly matters. Specimen gives creatives a space to talk openly about
rates, career paths, gatekeeping, racism, and accountability. It’s about shared knowledge, protecting one another, elevating one another, and changing the industry from the
inside out.
CosmoME: Why is the app named Specimen?
Maria: Historically, entertainment has always been rooted in spectacle. From early travelling sideshows and “freak shows” to vaudeville, cinema, and television, audiences have gathered to watch bodies, behaviours, and identities presented as something to be consumed. Difference has long been a form of currency—whether framed as curiosity, glamour, or shock.
As entertainment evolved, the spectacle became more polished but no less invasive. Fashion and pop culture transformed performers into carefully curated images, while still subjecting them to constant scrutiny. Celebrities, actors, and models became modern-day exhibits that are studied, idealised, criticised, and dissected in public view. In today’s digital era, this observation extends to everyone. Social media has turned daily life into performance, blurring the line between audience and subject. Hair, makeup, image, and identity are continuously watched, measured, and judged. When you consider the entertainment industry as a whole, the name Specimen makes perfect sense. We are all putting on a show. In many ways, we are all specimens.
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