The rumors have been swirling for a few weeks: Did Emma Stone shave her head? Is Emma Stone wearing a wig? And now, with her jaw-dropping arrival on the Golden Globes red carpet, the award-winning actor and perennial hair inspiration has all but confirmed that she did buzz herself bald, and we're seeing an early—and incredibly chic—stage of her growing-out process.

But as short as it is, a pixie cut doesn't style itself. Stone's long-time hairstylist, Mara Roszak, shared with Allure exactly what went into the prep for revealing the actor's dramatically different look.

“It's been growing out, and it's looking so stunning—very nineties in that nostalgic way,” Roszak tells Allure, sharing that her mood board included Winona Ryder in 1996 and Liv Tyler in 1998.

With hair this short, Roszak always insists on a day-of trim. “There's always a little bit of cleanup work you want to do,” she tells Allure. “The prep is really in the cut. The smallest tweak can make the biggest difference.” After that, while Stone's hair was damp, she used a comb to make sure that the back was smooth and to create not so much a severe part but a subtle division, "just a little more like where the hairs kind of go their separate ways.”

After rough drying Stone's hair about 70 percent of the way, Roszak, who's the founder of hair-care brand Roz, applies her latest launch, Evergreen Styling Cream—which also happens to be the only product used on Stone during the entire styling process. “This is a new take on what we've traditionally seen with harder, structured gels,” Roszak says. “But using this styling cream, you can actually re-brush through. It'll tame flyaways and de-fluff.”

Roszak used the dryer with the nozzle to continue directing those hairs, skipping the typical blowout round-brushing since Stone's length doesn't allow it. Instead, she used a toothbrush-like tool to get hairs to lay as she'd like. “And then once the hair was totally dry, I added more style cream," says Roskak, who adds that she finds the cream especially effective when hair is dry. “That's really where the styling and the shaping comes into play.”