Makeup & Momentum: How Cosmetics Are Closing the Gap in Women's Sports

It took time for women's sports and cosmetics to develop team chemistry, but addressing the intersecting spaces and faces within the game has produced a winning combination.

The WNBA played its first season in 1997, but didn't have an official beauty partner until Glossier came aboard in 2020 . By the time the league renewed its deal with Glossier last year, the brand was providing Caitlin Clark's glam for her WNBA Draft night , partnering with league athletes on lip gloss shades , and giving Team USA its first beauty partner at the Paris Olympics.

But that’s just the beginning. Despite slowly introducing itself to women’s sports, the cosmetics industry is making up for lost time by signing an increasing number of deals. And it’s proving to be a major score for athletes, teams, and leagues throughout.

Take the reigning WNBA champion New York Liberty as an example. A founding member of the league in 1997, the Liberty didn't have a beauty sponsor until it teamed with Hero Cosmetics in 2022-and only then for skin care. The next year, the Liberty made Nyx Professional Makeup its first official makeup partner before eventually breaking its cosmetics sponsorships into silos, bringing on L'Oreal-owned Essie as a nail polish partner and making Liberty mascot Ellie the brand's first celebrity spokesperson.

Today, Rihanna-founded Fenty Beauty and Fenty Skin have made the Liberty the brands' first WNBA partner , and more brands are trying to get in on the action.

Last year, Urban Decay renewed its sponsorship deal with the Los Angeles Sparks and named then-rookie Cameron Brink its brand ambassador. This year, CoverGirl rode an existing partnership with the Chicago Sky's Angel Reese into her team's first cosmetics sponsorship. Sephora, meanwhile, not only backed the WNBA's Golden State Valkyries during this inaugural season but also put its brand on referees during the Unrivaled 3-on-3 women's basketball league's debut. When the WNBA's expansion Toronto Tempo takes the court in 2026, Sephora will be with them as well.

Women's Sports Is Rewriting the Playbook

In addition, Charlotte Tilbury made its first foray into global sports sponsorship last year when it backed Formula 1’s F1 Academy developmental women’s racing circuit.

In the case of e.l.f. Cosmetics, the brand has spent recent years sponsoring NASCAR and IndyCar driver Katherine Legge, the Professional Women's Hockey League (PWHL), the Billie Jean King Cup tennis event, football ads, and the iHeart Women's Sports audio network in collaboration with iHeartMedia and Deep Blue Sports + Entertainment.

As women’s sports put more viewership, engagement, and sales on the scoreboard, brand enthusiasm follows.

According to a 2023 report by Wasserman's The Collective on women's soccer, female sports fans are younger, more highly educated, and more affluent compared to their male counterparts. They are also 54% more aware of sponsors and 45% more willing to buy from team sponsors than men.

The connection between cosmetics and women’s sports is profitable; it’s helping brands reach consumers; and, according to insiders, it’s about time.

Showing your whole self

Journalist Sarah Spain, the Emmy-and Peabody-award-winning host of iHeart’s Good Game podcast , said it "absolutely makes sense" and is "long overdue" for the cosmetics and beauty industries to have a substantial presence in women's sports.

"[It's] the very clear and perfect endorsement for a product that sometimes you can feel like you’re maybe getting duped by or you’re looking at Photoshop of," Spain said. "When you see it on an athlete, live in person, whether they’re at an event, or, even more importantly, during a game, when they’re sweating for two hours and their face still looks amazing, that is the perfect advertisement for that product."

Spain has spent the better part of two decades as a sports reporter and supplements the Good Game podcast with her on-air role at ESPN and, more recently, her second stint as a women's soccer club owner-following a minority ownership stake in the NWSL's Chicago Red Stars with an investment in USL W League club Minnesota Aurora FC.

She sees an "inherent transparency and authenticity to athletes" that makes them more relatable than the models and entertainers more commonly associated with the beauty industry: "The idea of an athlete being empowered in herself, versus being the result of other people looking at them,” she said.

That's a noted difference from when Spain first began her career, when women in sports were either sexualized as "the object of every man’s desire" or infantilized as "every little girl grown up" with "every dad or every mom or every young person using you as a role model for what it means to be playing for the love of the game,” instead of money and everything else.

"Yes, sometimes the sexualized folks were held up as cool, but compared to male athletes, where you could be a villain or a hero, funny or serious, sexy or not, all those options were available, and now that women can be masc or femme or straight or gay or funny or serious or super competitive or whatever they are," Spain said. "It just opens up the interaction between fans and athletes and between sponsors and athletes."

Six and a half years ago, Kory Marchisotto, CMO of e.l.f. Cosmetics, one of Spain’s sponsors, read "mountains" of feedback from the brand's consumers telling her that e.l.f. was not selling cosmetics: It was democratizing access. The company prided itself on having women comprise 67% of its board, but knew that 94% of women who hold executive positions have played sports.

In 2021 , e.l.f. began its sports campaigns by launching the e.l.f. You channel on video game streamer Twitch after learning that 77% of women on the platform reported being bullied. It's since sponsored girls' high school wrestling, women's tennis, hockey, and most recently the NWSL, a relationship that league svp of business development, Matt Soloff, said stemmed from a shared "challenger mindset."

For Marchisotto, the signal to keep moving ahead came at the 2024 Indianapolis 500 while joining Legge in the paddock as the race's first primary cosmetics sponsor .

"We’re standing there with her car, and it’s dripping with lip oil [branding], she’s got a lip oil in her pocket, and she’s putting on her lip oil, and I said, ‘How do you feel?'" Marchisotto said. "This was the day of the race, and she was racing later that afternoon, and she said, ‘This is the first time in over 40 years that I’m bringing my whole self to the game.'"

Beauty for all

When Shana Stephenson first arrived at the New York Liberty as its chief brand officer in late 2021, she wanted the team to have a beauty partner and didn't understand how brands in the category hadn't invested in the team before. The team's first partner, Hero Cosmetics, was a natural fit, as the Liberty's Gen Z fans, players, and staff were already wearing their patches to hide acne and blemishes.

The team's embrace of Hero Cosmetics came as women's sports overall were seeing increased viewership and access in the wake of the pandemic, and newly implemented name, image, and likeness (NIL) sponsorship rules for college athletes were opening up new brand partnership categories and social media potential. Sponsorships that eluded women's sports before Covid-19 became increasingly plausible.

"There was just such a limited lens in which brands were activating, investing, and hyper-focused on masculinity," Stephenson said. "These past few seasons, brands have been able to widen the lens through which they explore partnerships to understand how multi-dimensional these women athletes are, and we’re seeing a broader cultural shift that has extended into the brand partnership space."

As the Liberty considered the future of its beauty and cosmetics sponsorships, it viewed them in the context of objectives for the organization. When Nyx Professional Makeup came aboard in 2023, for example, the brand purchased the logo space on the team's shooting jackets and warm-up shirts and showed up on the team's marketing day to provide glam and makeup for players.

Rihanna's Fenty Signs First WNBA Team Deal With New York Liberty

The Liberty, which determined that it would require a "very, very, very large check" for the cosmetics category, instead broke opportunities into segments that would allow L'Oreal's Essie to provide nail polish both for Ellie and for athletes on media day while bringing in Fenty Beauty and Fenty Skin for warm-up gear, branded in-game video spots, marketing-day looks, and a diversity of makeup and skin care needs.

"As someone who’s a black woman and of a darker complexion, I’ve been there before where I might like a brand, but they didn’t have a foundation that was my color match, and that doesn’t make you feel great," Stephenson said. "Considering that diversity and inclusion are a big part of our identity and our pillars at the New York Liberty, and understanding that that’s also big for Fenty and has contributed to a lot of their success, it just felt so organic for us.”

Stephenson noted that Liberty players were familiar with Fenty, already using it in many cases, and they had expressed a desire to work with the brand. When the team heard that the feeling was mutual and realized "everything Rihanna touches is a win," it had to determine what it wanted the relationship to look like. Based in Brooklyn and sending its players and owners to New York Fashion Week and The Met Gala, the Liberty intersects with many of Fenty's interests.

"New York is a special place to our brand and founder, Rihanna: It's where the Fenty Beauty journey began when we launched in 2017," said Heather Fisher, CMO of Fenty Beauty. "Our brand is committed to always uphold our core mission of ‘Beauty For All,' and the NY Liberty team shares our deep commitment to authenticity and representation on and off the court."

Redefining ‘game face’

Sephora's North American headquarters on Market Street in San Francisco sits just two miles from the Chase Center, where the Golden State Valkyries are playing their first WNBA season and are already valued at $500 million by Sportico -No. 1 in the league, and $80 million ahead of the No. 2 Liberty.

That means the brand's newly formed marketing partnerships team didn't have to look all that far when finding new ways to connect with consumers through sports and entertainment. While Sephora made its debut in women's sports in the Unrivaled basketball league earlier this year-supplying on-court signage, a glam room, and referees' jerseys -and announced itself as a partner of the WNBA's Toronto Tempo for its debut season in 2026, it jumped on with the Valkyries as a founding partner in April .

The sponsorship placed a Sephora retail kiosk stocked with beauty products and a Sephora Sounds DJ booth featuring samples from the retailer's music collective at Chase Center, placed the brand logo on the Valkyries practice jerseys, and created digital content around the team. But it also put the Sephora brand squarely on the team’s 31,800-square-foot training facility in downtown Oakland, just 7.5 miles from Sephora HQ.

"Being the naming rights partner for the team's Oakland-based performance center, newly christened as the ‘Sephora Performance Center,'  represents a powerful symbol of our partnership with the Valkyries," said Sephora U.S. CMO Zena Arnold. "We are especially proud to show our support here, as there are only a handful of other dedicated facilities that currently exist in the league, and it's such a critical space for the team's training and development, both on and off the court."

In assessing potential sports sponsorships, Arnold said Sephora is looking for partners that align with its values, let it show those values while standing out from competitors, and create memorable experiences for potential customers. Jess Smith, the president of the Valkyries, said her team's young, diverse fans hit that checklist as soon as they walked through the Chase Center doors on May 6 for the first preseason game against the Los Angeles Sparks in full Valkyries merchandise-they were invested. Smith noted that for a brand looking for customer loyalty, latching onto a team that found a fervent fanbase in 50 states and 70 countries within the first four months of selling apparel-and is located in the brand's backyard-is a great way to represent its values.

But by having its brand behind the scenes at a practice facility, on a press tour, at a team media day, or in the tunnel as players show their game faces to social media, Smith said Sephora builds a presence with the team that's visible in a more practical sense. While signage builds brand and Sephora's position on the Valkryries' brand impact council can address investment in the Bay Area through sports, actually showing the value of Sephora's goods to teams and athletes is building a bigger space for its industry within women's sports.

"The product of women’s sports is a mix of sport, purpose, and culture," Smith said. "When you think of beauty, and you think of the opportunity of representation within beauty-which is super important to Sephora-beauty is not makeup: Beauty means something so much more so, like the ability to partner together to showcase the different types of athletes, the different types of fans that use beauty or define themselves in beauty in different ways."