Chicago Sky forward Isabelle Harrison remembers the precise moment she felt most neglected by the sweetness industry as a female athlete. 

It got here through the fall of 2021 — just before Harrison’s fifth WNBA season — when Colourpop released a group of themed eye shadow palettes paying homage to 6 NBA teams, including the Boston Celtics and the Los Angeles Lakers. 

“It was certainly one of the primary times I actually felt irritated by a beauty brand,” said Harrison, who had inked her first beauty cope with Neutrogena not long before then, and would go on to develop into a Glossier ambassador two years later. “To base the gathering on NBA teams knowing there’s a whole women’s league, and also you’re catering to a predominantly female audience — it felt like a missed opportunity on their part.”

Though it was clear to Harrison how an NBA partnership — one which marked the league’s first beauty foray at that — could quickly prove lucrative for any brand, beauty’s prevailing unwillingness to play an extended game, so to talk, in betting on female athletes, felt disconcerting.

That establishment has steadily been changing, though, as brands across hair care, makeup and skincare increasingly tap into the skilled and collegiate female athlete pools as a way to further their reach, representation and — importantly — storytelling. 

The WNBA, which reported a 21 percent increase in viewership in 2023 versus the 2022 season, has proven a key avenue, while other buzzy sports like tennis and Formula 4 are also emerging as ripe for the sweetness treatment — to which brands like La-Roche Posay and Anastasia Beverly Hills can attest. 

“We’re turning this corner where athletes are emerging because the ‘super women’ of endorsers,” said Rheann Engelke, director of athletic marketing at talent agency Range Sports. 

“They’re dynamic within the sense that their makeup has to endure extreme conditions; they’re as gorgeous and influential as these straight makeup influencers we’re seeing, they usually touch that world of celebrity — they’re like this one-stop power shop as ambassadors.”

Added Leslie Hall, founding father of Iced Media: “A number of your typical beauty creators have gotten pretty saturated when it comes to the variety of brands they’re promoting — it could possibly be useful to look outside of that core beauty creator community that looks like it’s working with a unique product every week.”  

Because female athletes are still relatively nascent partners to the world of beauty, brands seem like clamoring to inaugurate as many “firsts” as possible of their realm.

In 2020, Glossier’s multiyear sign-on because the WNBA’s first official beauty partner set the stage for a flurry of beauty deals to return for the game. Tracee Ellis Ross’ Pattern Beauty signed with the Washington Mystics in 2022; Mielle Organics joined because the league’s first official textured hair care partner in 2023, and Nyx Skilled Makeup announced its partnership with Recent York Liberty through the Brooklyn-based team’s vigorous 2023 championship run — certainly one of the few vivid spots of an overall lackluster 12 months for Recent York sports.

LVMH Moët Hennessy Louis Vuitton-owned Sephora will kick off the Paris 2024 Olympic and Paralympic games as an official sponsor of the Olympic Torch Relay — one component of the French conglomerate’s broader inaugural sponsorship of the games — while Procter & Gamble is ready to proceed its longtime sponsorship of the Olympics in Paris with a series of yet-to-be-revealed activations.

Brands are also listening to the high-revenue world of school athletics following recent policy changes allowing student athletes to monetize their brand through name, image and likeness (NIL) deals. 

One college sports star particularly — Louisiana State University forward Angel Reese — quickly climbed onto brands’ radars through the lead-up to her team’s historic basketball title win last April. Reese’s talent and charisma have up to now garnered her greater than 2.6 million TikTok followers, and deals with brands like Reebok, Tampax and Mielle, the latter of which signed a one-year partnership along with her last May. 

“She was definitely a bull’s-eye goal for our Gen Z audience, but we also saw she was resonating with Millennials — she brought a level of fanfare and a focus to the game that just hadn’t been seen before,” said Mielle president Omar Goff. 

Data from CreatorIQ indicates that through the first six months of her Mielle ambassadorship, Reese garnered $296,500 in earned media value for the brand across 17 posts, making her Mielle’s eighth-biggest EMV driver through the period. 

Most of this EMV got here from Reese’s TikTok page, which saw a lot of “Get Ready With Me” videos featuring Mielle products, promotion of a limited-edition bundle of her favorite products by the brand, and a industrial during which she appeared alongside Mielle cofounder and chief executive officer Monique Rodriguez, which also aired on Hulu and other streaming platforms.

Though Reese’s current contract with the brand ends in May, Goff said that “for so long as she’s willing and Mielle is willing, I’d like to see, five to 10 years down the road, during her profession within the WNBA — we remain partners.” 

Mielle can also be investing in other sports on college campuses, having recently teamed up with the Howard swim team and Florida A&M University’s cheer team, with other potential partnerships of the like on the horizon. 

“This is just not a short-term game for us; specializing in women’s sports and shining a lightweight on those which have traditionally been ignored by beauty brands goes to be a core strategy we put money into for years to return,” said Goff, adding that it’s “hard to attribute which sport is driving the business more; I feel it’s our unwavering commitment to the strategy, our showing up authentically and never just showing up for a moment — but actually making it a movement.”

La Roche-Posay, too, is doubling down on its efforts with an eye fixed on longevity. 

In 2022 the brand became the primary sun care partner of the U.S. Open, and when it reignited the partnership in 2023 it added one other dimension — individual partnerships with players Madison Keys and Frances Tiafoe lasting through 2024.

The partnerships marked the brand’s first long-term ambassadors who aren’t dermatologists, said Guillaume Monsel, vp and head of promoting and digital, and involve three key elements. 

The primary involves public appearances at PR events or college campuses to guide discussions about sun safety alongside the brand’s dermatologists; the second, repping the brand and its products at sporting events just like the U.S. Open, and the third, a minimum required variety of social media posts every year — which Keys, a longtime fan of the brand, has already exceeded by her own accord.  

“Each athletes are change-makers for us, but Madison, when it comes to engagement and community constructing — she’s tremendous. She’s easily posted about us two to thrice greater than what’s required within the contract,” said Monsel, adding that La Roche-Posay has a 65 percent female audience and is conducting research to evaluate — and hopefully, play a lead role in boosting — sunscreen adoption levels amongst male consumers, partially through partnerships like that with Tiafoe.

“Frances has been transparent about not necessarily wearing sunscreen daily,” said Monsel, adding that Tiafoe’s content has consequently focused on changing his usual SPF behavior, while Keys’ approach has been about promoting her core habits. 

In a bid to determine its dominance within the outdoor sports space, La Roche-Posay signed on last November because the official sponsor of the National Pickleball Tournament and has begun backing a lot of small golf tournaments. In total, the brand sponsors around 35 outdoor events — up from zero in 2021 — and goals to achieve a complete of 100 within the near future, including some concert and lifestyle events. 

“We would like to search out pockets, whether in tennis or other female sports where there is just not equal pay, not as much sponsorship dollars or support, and be the primary brand to be there,” said Monsel, adding that the brand’s skincare business has grown roughly 500 percent through the last 4 years, while its sun care business has tripled through the period, successful he attributes largely to investment in education-based social media content. 

While Glossier initially kicked off its WNBA partnership with a concentrate on the brand’s body care offerings, chief marketing officer Kleo Mack said the brand soon “realized the potential of the partnership far beyond body [care]; WNBA players love beauty in all forms, whether that’s a full face of glam on the court, or simply moisturizer and sunscreen.”

The brand most recently tapped a cohort of players including Harrison, Ariel Atkins and Natalie Achonwa last summer for a campaign promoting the launch of its Stretch Fluid Foundation, $34, and has continued to steadily pump out activations including courtside signage, product seedings to athletes and hosting influencers at games. 

“Like Glossier, the WNBA has multigenerational appeal; we would like this partnership to feel wholly integrated into what we’re doing as a brand,” Mack said. 

As a part of its Fluid Stretch campaign, Glossier brought Atkins and Anchowa onto Brooke DeVard’s Naked Beauty Podcast to debate the partnership and their respective athlete journeys, during which Anchowa discussed her experience playing in games while being pregnant. 

“I feel female athletes as ambassadors can translate across channels,” said DeVard. “For younger people, especially those that are buying more mass brands, they will look up to those women as role models, but then in the posh space, there’s something in regards to the level of accomplishment these women are reaching that is amazingly aspirational.”

It will probably also defy expectations — certainly one of the core goals of Anastasia Beverly Hills’ recent sponsorship of F4 racing driver Bianca Bustamente on the Macao Grand Prix. 

“I’ve gotten criticism for wearing makeup while I race, but that’s one thing I’ve all the time loved — is the proven fact that I can mix creativity, beauty and motorsport, and be feminine in a male-dominated sport,” said 19-year-old Bustamente in an interview with WWD last November. 

Last fall, track and field Olympic gold medalist Sydney McLaughlin-Levrone joined the ranks of Jenna Ortega and Kerry Washington as a Neutrogena ambassador, and Saint Jane founder Casey Georgesen — whose 14-year-old daughter Sofia plays indoor volleyball — more recently tapped Olympic volleyball player Kim Glass for a campaign promoting the brand’s recent Star Flower Niacinamide Serum. 

Notably few beauty brands have tapped into gymnastics, which has long touted certainly one of the most important viewerships of any Olympic sport — a 2021 survey by Statista reported American adults were most considering watching gymnastics (32 percent were “very interested” in tuning in), with swimming, diving and track and field following as the following most-popular sports. 

Hall posited that beauty’s lag in taking to the game could partially be as a result of the proven fact that competing gymnasts often skew younger than energetic athletes in other sports — Paris hopefuls Kaliya Lincoln and Joscelyn Robertson, for instance, are each still minors, which complicates NIL deals. 

There are some exceptions, nevertheless. P&G Belgium is presently sponsoring 23-year-old Olympic hopeful gymnast Nina Derwael; gymnastics powerhouse Simone Biles previously linked with SK-II and a handful of other female athletes for a campaign ahead of the 2021 Olympics, and six-time Olympic medalist Aly Raisman inked short-term ambassadorship deals with Revision Skincare and Philosophy in 2015 and 2022, respectively. 

With college gymnastics seeing its highest ESPN viewership of any NCAA gymnastics championship in 2023 — up 11 percent from 2022— rising college athletes like LSU’s Olivia Dunne, who has nearly 8 million TikTok followers, could very likely prove fruitful beauty ambassadors.

While L’Oréal Paris has tapped Dunne to create some odd TikTok videos using the brand’s products, she has yet to be scooped up by beauty in a giant way — despite On3’s NIL tracker indicating she is the highest-paid female athlete within the NCAA with an estimated valuation of $3.5 million annually, because of deals with GrubHub, American Eagle Outfitters and other corporations. 

“The WNBA feels easier to plug into because there’s precedent of sponsorship there,” said DeVard, who anticipates that gymnastics sponsorships in beauty could — and will — be on the up soon. 

Opportunity for beauty brands is indeed ample at present within the WNBA, which is able to add a thirteenth, San Francisco-based team in 2025 — the identical 12 months the league is slated to renegotiate its collective bargaining agreements, which determine players’ salary caps. 

“With WNBA players — their contracts aren’t big on the court in any respect. Endorsement money can at times triple what they’re making on the court — it’s an enormous source of income for them,” said Engelke. 

Faith Suggs, director of promoting at Sports International Group, sees this rise in ambassadorships as having a reciprocal profit for the league itself by further propelling its visibility.

“Viewership is directly correlated to the expansion of the league, and the expansion of the league directly impacts athletes’ salaries — [ambassadorships] not only provide a financial boost for athletes, but they supply that platform for them to inform their stories and construct their very own brands off the court,” she said. 

It’s precisely the form of storytelling that’s poised to define the longer term of beauty marketing.

“Partnering with athletes specifically speaks to women which are just juggling multiple things. Profession women, moms, multihyphenates — they’ve a kind of duality women wish to see increasingly more,” said DeVard.