Pretty in Any Color: Women in Basketball Make the Style Rules

Players in women's basketball are styling themselves how they want, because they can. Their choices also can be lucrative.

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By Remy Tumin and Alanis Thames

Angel Reese considers herself "a pink kind of girl."

Pink nails, pink hair tie, pink shoes, sometimes even "a little bit of pink in my lashes," Reese said of the eyelash extensions she applies before basketball games. "Everything's pink."

It's all part of the pregame routine for Reese, who in May transferred to Louisiana State after a breakout season on Maryland's women's basketball team. Before Reese hits the court, she swipes on lip gloss and gels down her edges — her hairline — to prevent flyaways.

"Grandma would always emphasize, ‘Don't let anybody make your makeup sweat,’" Reese said.

Reese's devotion to her appearance for games expresses who she is as much as her playing style. Players in women's basketball freely use style touches that are popular in Black and Latina culture, like gelled edges. It's a freedom that some say is an advancement in a sport whose athletes have historically been pressured to fit a mass-market ideal that has long benefited straight, white women. Reese is Black.

But the introduction of name, image and likeness deals in college sports and an influx of marketing money in professional women's basketball have added dollars-and-cents stakes to female players’ decisions to glam up. In interviews with a dozen college and professional players, women talked about how the decision on how to express themselves through their appearance has been changing.

"I’ve never really felt the pressure until the N.I.L. thing started," said Reese, whose endorsement deals include Xfinity, Amazon, Wingstop and a Washington, D.C.-area supermarket chain.

Stanford forward Cameron Brink usually applies concealer, eyebrow gel, mascara and maybe a little blush before she heads out for a game, but she scoffed at the idea of in-game touch-ups. "I look like this when I was playing, I’m going to live with it," she said.

Her shot-blocking was a key piece of Stanford's run to the 2022 Final Four, where the team lost to Connecticut in front of 3.23 million TV viewers, a 19 percent increase over the previous season and a 49 percent bump from 2019, before the coronavirus pandemic. But there's also a swelling fan base that follows Brink on social media. She posts makeup tutorials, which she loves because she views makeup as art. "It's really relaxing to me," she said. Brink has had deals with ThirdLove, Visible Mobile, the energy drink Celsius and Portland Gear.

She acknowledged that her following — 203,000 on Instagram and 62,800 on TikTok — had built up at least in part "because I do play into that role of being feminine and dressing femininely."

"There is a pressure for me to look a certain way," said Brink, who is white. "Sometimes it's refreshing to go out and play sports and not worry about it."

Last year, the N.C.A.A. changed its rules to allow college athletes to profit from their names, images and likenesses in marketing deals. Women's college basketball players quickly began out-earning athletes in every other sport besides football, according to the marketing company Opendorse. Connecticut's Paige Bueckers, who is white, signed with Gatorade for an estimated $1 million.

Blake Lawrence, a co-founder of Opendorse, said female college basketball players had outshined their male counterparts in the N.I.L. marketplace in part because of how they distinguish themselves through their appearance.

"They’re willing to create content; they’re willing to create a character that you want to follow and cheer for while on the court, while on the track, while on the grass," Lawrence said. "That may be through hairstyle changes; that may be through makeup changes; that may be through the accessories that you bring to the field."

But with that can come tremendous pressure to fit traditional notions of attractiveness, adding another layer of competition to college basketball.

"Comparing yourself to other people — oh, this girl is really pretty; oh, she looks really pretty — it's hard," Oklahoma guard Kelbie Washington said.

Washington enjoys spraying on perfume as part of her pregame routine (Jimmy Choo is her favorite), and she pays for eyelash extensions, which can cost more than $130 a set.

"Everyone is human," she said of the urge to compare herself with others. "Everyone has those emotions, whether they say it out loud or not."

TV ratings for college and W.N.B.A. games are rising, and the profiles of the players — among the most vocal and visible social justice activists in sports — are exploding.

Within that explosion, Victoria Jackson, a sports historian at Arizona State, sees the players driving a generational shift, a reframing of norms. "Athletes themselves are pushing back against historical ideas of what it means to be a female athlete and what's acceptable to be performed as a female athlete," Jackson said, adding that the W.N.B.A. is "a good example" of that.

Nefertiti A. Walker, an associate professor in sports management at the University of Massachusetts Amherst and a former college basketball player, said players didn't necessarily feel as if they had to fit the usual standards.

"What you’re seeing is certainly athletes now who, because of the changes we’ve seen in college sport — they all have pride nights, there's gay marriage now — all these changes that have happened in their lifetime that signal it might be OK to perform their gender in a different way," she said.

That may be true on the court, but a recent swimsuit edition of Sports Illustrated suggested a narrower view of sex appeal, which can be an important factor in marketing. The magazine included five W.N.B.A. players in bikinis and one-piece swimsuits with cutouts.

Courtney Williams, an All-Star guard on the Connecticut Sun, said on Twitter that the shoot would have been better if it had included a player in a sports bra and baggy shorts. "There's more than one way to look sexy, and I hope in the future we can tap into that," she said.

Jonquel Jones was the W.N.B.A.'s most valuable player in 2021. "If u don't fit into the normal stereotype of what feminine is or what it ‘should be’ you lose opportunities," Jones said in an August 2020 Twitter post. "Women have to be so much more marketable than men."

W.N.B.A. players, with a maximum base salary of about $230,000, earn far less than their millionaire counterparts in the N.B.A., making marketing dollars even more important. The W.N.B.A. has a pool of $1 million that it must spend on marketing deals for players, and each team has to spend between $50,000 and $100,000 per year on player marketing deals. Any unspent amount carries over to the next season on top of the minimum.

The league said it selects players to participate in marketing efforts based on a variety of factors: on-court performance, an established personal brand with an active fan base, and the willingness to travel and participate in league events.

"Ideas about bodies play out most explicitly on the bodies of athletes — harmful ideas and also positive ideas," Jackson said. "That's another way in which this can be a space of conflict and a space of harm, too, depending on the way those ideas are packaged and sold."

Tiffany Mitchell likes to feel the swing of her ponytail as she runs the court.

Mitchell, who is Black, has often worn her hair in long, braided styles past her waist since she starred at South Carolina from 2012 to 2016. This kind of protective hairstyling allows her to go longer between restyling and can prevent breakage during the grind of the season with the W.N.B.A.'s Indiana Fever.

Those swinging braids became an issue during the W.N.B.A. off-season in December, when she was competing with the Melbourne Boomers, a professional women's team in Australia. Basketball Australia, the sport's governing body, said the league's players had to tie their hair back or up, mistakenly attributing the policy to a FIBA rule that was no longer in effect. Mitchell, one of just three Black players on the Boomers’ roster, felt targeted, since she had never had to change her hair for other international competitions. Basketball Australia later apologized and rescinded what it called a "discriminatory" policy.

"They have no idea about what a Black woman goes through, let alone an athlete," Mitchell said. "So I think that me bringing it to their attention called out the ignorance because there have been players in this league that have had braids before me, and it was never an issue."

As early as fifth grade, Deja Kelly's mother encouraged her to create a signature hairstyle.

"She would call it a ‘D-I do’: If you want to go D-I, you have to look like you play D-I," Kelly said.

She adopted a slicked-back ponytail or a bun as her preferred hairstyles. Her glam routine now — eyelash extensions, a tight bun and detailed edges — "has never affected my performance" as the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill's leading scorer last season. Kelly has had endorsement deals with Dunkin’, Beats by Dre, Forever 21 and the sports drink Barcode, among others.

"For me, when I look good, I feel good, I play good," Kelly said. "That's something I always prided myself in."

Walker, the sports management professor, said her studies on women's sports pointed to a trend: Women in basketball are showcasing greater agency and self-determination by glamming.

"A lot of women's basketball players feel free to express themselves, to perform in a way aesthetically that accomplishes whatever they want to accomplish," Walker said. "Sometimes we underestimate how business savvy they are, particularly in this day and age."

Connecticut Sun guard DiJonai Carrington has had an endorsement deal with Savage X Fenty, Rihanna's lingerie brand. She makes sure she has on her 20-millimeter mink eyelash extensions before every game. Her nails, typically coated with some sort of bright polish, are usually done with acrylic extensions. She's grown so accustomed to applying gel to her hairline that it takes her only about 30 seconds.

"I feel like I play better. I don't know if I do or I don't, but I just feel like I do," Carrington said. "And I never have wanted to compromise one thing or another, whether that's being a hooper and being a dog on the court and still being able to look a certain way."

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