Legge has two decades of experience in pro racing, including in prestigious endurance events like the 24 Hours of Daytona. “So my main concern is, I’m going to be so hungry,” Legge, 45, tells me in a chilly conference room in Manhattan’s Flatiron District, laughing as she huddles into an oversize red hoodie. If all goes to plan, she’ll scarf down a full meal in transit between races and then replenish with a few sport gels in the car in Charlotte.

And — again, if all goes to plan — when she emerges at the finish line(s), legions of women watching on television will be taking note of how well Legge’s liquid eyeliner has held up inside her sweaty helmet while her eyes water against 6 Gs of lateral force.

The British driver’s two-race effort will be sponsored by E.L.F. Cosmetics, and because only a driver’s eyes are visible on track, Legge’s beauty routine will be focused mostly on sun protection (E.L.F.’s Halo Glow tinted sunscreen, she says), brows and lashes. “I love their Lash XTNDR mascara. I have really short, stubby eyelashes,” Legge explains, “so it’s a lifesaver.”

For decades, partnerships between women athletes and beauty brands were a rarity, neither side pursuing the other with much gusto. Over the past half-decade, that’s changed. Skin care, hair care and cosmetics brands have raced to cash in on the exploding popularity of women’s leagues such as the WNBA and the National Women’s Soccer League.

Legge’s E.L.F.-powered effort to complete the Double will be a still-rare instance of a beauty brand sponsoring an athlete in a sport in which men and women compete together. But it’s one more example of the new world we live in, where female athletes and the beauty industry have enthusiastically linked arms to their mutual benefit: Women in sports get funding, while brands get popular spokeswomen to showcase how well their hair and makeup products hold up through the daily pursuits of active women.

Perhaps most importantly, the mass infusion of beauty into women’s sports has helped broaden the range of ideals for what a female athlete can look like, especially in sports where women have historically had to seem less feminine to be taken seriously. For athletes like Legge, that’s a big deal.

“Times are changing,” she says. Beauty and women’s sports aren’t just coexisting, they’re symbiotically thriving, “as well they should.”

A false binary

The long-existing tension between femininity and athleticism is well-known and tough to quantify in hard data. But in the early 2000s and 2010s, researchers like Vikki Krane conducted studies with female athletes, interviewing them about their relationships with their bodies. Krane and a research team found in 2004 that these women frequently lived within a “paradox of dueling identities,” walking a fine line between feeling they looked too feminine to be taken seriously as an athlete and too masculine to be conventionally appealing.

There’s a spectrum in women’s sports, explains Krane’s longtime research partner Sally Ross, a professor of sport management at Grand Valley State University, of “expectations of femininity.” Gymnasts and figure skaters she has interviewed in research settings felt more pressure to appear stereotypically feminine. Softball players, meanwhile, “were kind of all over the place,” Ross remembers. In every sport, of course, makeup and styling were day-by-day decisions, not permanent parts of any athlete’s identity. Some, Ross recalls, only put on makeup for a game if it would be televised.

And then there were female athletes who felt pressure to present themselves as less feminine. Legge, who has spent much of her 20-year career as either the sole woman on the starting grid or one of a very small handful, felt that pressure herself.

A self-professed skin care addict in her own time (“My bathroom is embarrassing,” she admits), Legge nevertheless understood in her early years of racing that her beauty interests were best left out of her professional life. “I just wanted to fit in and be, like, one of the guys.”

Other women she’s raced alongside, she says, did the same. “I think it was a negative thing: If you were girly, it was seen as a weakness in some way.”

A shift, though, began to take place around 2020, the year the makeup brand Glossier became the official “beauty partner” of the ascendant Women’s National Basketball Association. Eight players, including Sue Bird, appeared in promos for two full-body skin care products. Soon, cosmetics were popping up all over the WNBA. The Golden State Valkyries, who train at the Sephora Performance Center, get ready for their games in locker rooms outfitted with vanity mirrors. There’s even a Glam Room stocked with high-end beauty products for media days. And the National Women’s Soccer League, like Legge, is sponsored by E.L.F.

Individual female athletes, too, began signing beauty-brand deals. Ilona Maher, an American rugby player and a breakout star of the 2024 Olympics, partnered with Maybelline after years of wearing the brand’s lipstick on the field with nary a smudge, outlasting sweat and repeated tackling.

Initially, when E.L.F. first approached Legge about a deal in 2023, she was surprised. “You have those conversations, over dinner or at the bar: ‘Wouldn’t it be funny to have, I don’t know, an Always car?’ Or something really girly,” Legge says, referring to the brand of feminine hygiene products. And, instinctively, she cringed a little when E.L.F. suggested she drive a pink car in that year’s Indy 500.

“I was like: ‘Oh, no. I don’t want to be the girl driving the pink car. This is so cliché,’” she recalls.

But Legge ultimately signed the deal and drove the pink car, and something surprising happened. “It was very recognizable, and everybody started asking questions. ‘Oh, there’s a girl in the race? Oh, she’s the only one?’ Then there was this sea of people wearing pink Katherine jerseys. All these little girls and their moms,” Legge says.

Ultimately, the stunt highlighted the robust portion of racing enthusiasts who are female, reminding fellow fans, sponsors and racing teams that “it’s not just for dudes,” Legge says. In her hot-pink car that year, Legge became the fastest woman to ever qualify for the Indy 500.

Beauty money is real money

Getting sponsorships in racing is hard; historically, it’s been especially hard for women. Janet Guthrie, the first woman to compete in the Indy 500 in 1977, told the Los Angeles Times 10 years later: “Men are getting sponsorship and women can’t. That sounds unfair. But who cares about unfair? What counts is the bottom line. Sponsors want the publicity that racing brings. But a successful woman driver will get 10 times the attention that a man will get. So, now, what really is important?”

Lyn St. James, the first woman to win the Indy 500 Rookie of the Year award when she first participated in 1992, asked 150 companies to sponsor her for that race before securing a deal with J.C. Penney.

Plenty of male drivers had just as much trouble, of course: “Our business model is unique in the sports world,” St. James, now 79, is quick to point out. Still, St. James — who served as president of the Women’s Sports Foundation from 1990 to 1993 — is well aware of the funding gap that disadvantages women’s sports and female athletes all over the globe. So dollars from the beauty industry, which counts its annual worldwide revenue in the hundreds of billions, are as valid and welcome as any, as far as St. James is concerned.

A challenge for women in racing, though, is that they compete in a sport that’s still overwhelmingly male, and therefore do not enjoy the same influx of advertising revenue. That’s where Legge’s deal with E.L.F. could be game-changing: “I just wish other advertisers would see it and go, ‘Well, why aren’t we doing that?’”

One has, at least. In 2024, Charlotte Tilbury announced a partnership with the female-driver development program F1 Academy.

While St. James admits she herself would not have been a great fit for a makeup sponsorship (“The minute I go to a press conference and I have to put lipstick on, I’m chewing it off,” she tells me), the brand’s sponsorship of Legge is “a piece of magic.”

Expectation vs. liberation

Certainly, beauty brands’ sudden enthusiasm for women’s sports carries with it the risk that athletes will feel obligated to wear makeup, or style their hair or nails.

As Ross, the researcher and professor, points out, that might perpetuate an equal and opposite problem: “We went through that whole period of ‘sex sells,’” Ross says. Lest we forget, there was the whole Anna Kournikova era — when being hot proved to be a more lucrative strategy for female athletes than winning.

But for athletes who find joy or confidence in their beauty routines, to be able to go full glam and still be taken seriously can be liberating. “And that’s kind of the bottom line, right? ‘Take us seriously as athletes, whether we wear makeup or we don’t,’” Ross says. “‘Whether we fit the image you expect of us or not.’”

For Legge, seeing other women in historically masculine-coded sports collaborate with beauty brands unlocked something. Before that, the idea was “pretend that you’re not a woman,” Legge says.

So it’s almost like it’s possible to be an elite athlete and be pretty, and it’s actually not that complicated?

“Well, you can be pretty without makeup, too,” she’s quick to correct me.

Rather, “it’s a ‘You can’t be it if you can’t see it’ thing,” she says. By the time Legge started talking to E.L.F., a critical mass of other athletes had normalized what Atlanta Dream forward Angel Reese, in a makeup video for Vogue last year, memorably described as “being super girly and super cute but also a dog on the court.”