Finding the Beauty in Sports
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Two years ago during the Super Bowl, while I was mindlessly eating buffalo chicken dip and guacamole, something caught my eye that I wasn’t expecting. “Is this…a makeup commercial?!” I asked incredulously, turning up the volume on my TV to be sure. Indeed, it was: In an advertisement for e.l.f. Cosmetics, Jennifer Coolidge sat in front of a vanity packed with beauty products, wearing a silk flamingo-pink dress and sporting pointy, glitter-flecked nails. She spread e.l.f.’s Power Grip Primer on her face and proceeded to get stuck to everything in sight to demonstrate its sticky qualities.
While the commercial was a fleeting moment of whimsy, I kept replaying it in my head. A makeup commercial…during the Super Bowl? Among the testosterone-fueled spots for Bud Light and Michelob Ultra, Jennifer Coolidge was swathed in fuchsia and speaking directly to a female audience. In 2024, the momentum grew. Last year, four beauty brands—e.l.f., Dove, NYX, and CeraVe—all advertised in the Super Bowl. It was an unprecedented number, according to Ad Age. These ads didn’t just stand out, they seemed to be a litmus test for the culture at large. The beauty industry is officially betting on sports.
Some may try to chalk this up to the Taylor Swift effect, but that doesn’t give women—and their varied, multifaceted interests—enough credit. I come from a sports family and grew up thinking of the Super Bowl as a holiday. As a kid, my brother and I painted our faces if our team was playing and my dad made wings, but when I moved out of my parents’ house, I found myself tuning into the big game less and less. My interest piqued again in my late twenties, and I can’t really pinpoint why (maybe it had something to do with social media, or my friends watching games, or yes, even Taylor Swift). Regardless, the fact that I watched the past two Super Bowls from start to finish was a cultural indicator in and of itself. I was one of 58.5 million women who tuned in—Super Bowl LVIII drew the most female viewers of any Super Bowl ever, with a 9 percent increase from the previous year. The beauty industry is taking notice.
E.l.f. has continued to invest in the NFL during this football season, including with a new campaign for their Power Grip Primer called “eyes. lips. face. fandom.” starring Joey King. For this year's Super Bowl, Dove is back with a 30-second commercial airing during the fourth quarter. Like e.l.f., it aims to redefine femininity and how women fit into sports, by showing a little girl who jogs on the sidewalk to an interpolation of Bruce Springsteen’s “Born to Run.” “At three, these legs are unstoppable,” the spot says. “At 14, she’ll think they’re unbearable. One in two girls who quit sports are criticized for their body type. Let’s change the way we talk to our girls.” To Dove, advertising during the big game is an opportunity to highlight women’s strength and limitless potential, while we watch male bodies being celebrated for the same.
2024 wasn’t just the year that women watched football. It was also the year that women’s sports took off—viewership in the NCAA women’s basketball finals was up 103 percent from last year, and the WNBA draft audience was up 89 percent in women viewers. Young women are the fastest-growing sports audience. Sephora, Glossier, and Urban Decay have all chosen to invest in women’s basketball. Before recent mega-successful stars like Caitlin Clark and Angel Reese came on the court, women’s basketball was often overlooked in comparison to the men’s league, and only received 4 percent of all basketball coverage.
Now that women’s basketball has taken off, players are getting the spotlight. Take Cameron Brink, of the Los Angeles Sparks, who’s known for her defensive prowess, and her long blonde hair and doe-eyed makeup. “She’s the epitome of sports intersecting fashion,” one fan gushed on Instagram. “I have really owned and loved embracing my feminine side,” says Brink, who is now an ambassador for Urban Decay. “Doing my makeup and my hair is very integral in my daily routine and what I do before games.”
Glossier, with its no-makeup makeup aesthetic, has also made women’s basketball players the focal point of recent campaigns. The brand’s Stretch Complexion launch in 2023 starred Izzy Harrison, Ariel Atkins, Stephanie Soares, Diamond Miller, Natalie Achonwa, and Brea Beal, while their Lip Gloss launch in 2024 featured Brionna Jones, Didi Richards, Skylar Diggins-Smith and Ezi Magbegor. The campaigns exploded on social media, and the brand says the 2024 lip gloss campaign was even more successful than the 2023 concealer campaign. That’s not the only metric of success. “Every time we post the custom Glossier basketballs we’ve made, we receive hundreds of customer inquiries asking for us to sell them,” a Glossier representative says.
The best part about beauty’s foray into sports is that as more and more women watch and play sports, the partnership doesn’t feel forced. Growing up, I often thought of sports in the context of my brother, who was our high school’s quarterback and a baseball star. Sports were for him, not for me, and they felt diametrically opposed to my interest in makeup. Partnerships between beauty brands and women athletes are one part of ensuring that no young girls grow up thinking about sports the way I did. “Women athletes are increasingly recognized and looked up to not only for their athletic achievement but also for their individuality—their personal style, beauty routines, and much more,” says a Sephora spokesperson. To help celebrate women athletes, Sephora has partnered with Unrivaled, a new player-owned league that keeps players stateside in the WNBA off-season and pays its players more than twice the average WNBA salary.
Other brands have chosen to take even more out-of-the-box approaches to mixing sports with beauty. Charlotte Tilbury, ever the intrepid entrepreneur, took note when she saw that so many women are interested in F1, and decided to sponsor the F1 Academy during the 2024 season. She hopes to see more women as drivers next. “There’s a huge disconnect between the representation in the sport and the people watching it,” Tilbury says. “Forty percent of F1 fans are female and yet more women have orbited the earth than driven an F1 car.” (She’s not wrong—only five women have qualified driven in a Formula 1 Grand Prix, while 75 women have flown to space.) Not only was this Tilbury’s first ever global sports sponsorship, but Charlotte Tilbury became the first female-founded beauty brand to partner with the F1 Academy.
Of course, beauty brands see a business opportunity in sports. Still, I find it meaningful. As someone who spent most of my adolescence cheering on my brother at games rather than playing them myself, I can’t help but wonder what this kind of representation would have meant for me as a kid. Would I have kept playing sports for longer if I had more role models to look up to? Would I have been grateful for my muscular thighs instead of engaging in borderline disordered eating habits through my teenage years? I’ll never know for sure, but it heartens me that so many big beauty brands are investing in women’s athletes and sports viewership.
It’s also encouraging to see women like Brink—feminine, strong, and unapologetic—emerge as role models for a new generation of girls who want to play sports. “I love to walk into the arena, standing up straight, with my chin up high,” says Brink. “I think makeup helps me do that. Being able to cross that into the other world I'm passionate about, which is basketball…it’s a match made in heaven.”
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