Welcome to Office Hours, a Paddock Project exclusive interview series with drivers, team principals, and top executives in and around the world of Formula 1. Today’s interview is with Amy Mansell, Global Chief Partnerships Officer at Elemis, the first beauty sponsor in F1.
Sephora just joined Formula 1.
The beauty retailer, an LVMH company, is sponsoring Natalia Granada in F1 Academy, partnering with the F1 Paddock Club to put glam bars at 18 races this season, and hosting an end-of-year F1 Academy celebration event. Given LVMH’s existing ten-year F1 partnership, the business logic is obvious.
Sephora isn’t the first beauty partner through the gates, and the category has grown more interesting than most people realize. The way I see it, beauty’s presence in the sport is taking three distinct shapes.
The first is F1 Academy sponsorship: beauty brands backing female drivers and female-led initiatives. This is where the momentum has been strongest. Charlotte Tilbury, Wella, and now Sephora have all found a home here. It makes intuitive sense: a series built around bringing more women into the sport is a natural entry point for brands whose customers are predominantly women. This category is thriving.
The second is F1 proper: full championship partnerships where a beauty brand sits alongside the oil companies and financial institutions that have historically defined the grid. ELEMIS is leading the charge here as Aston Martin's Official Skincare Partner, and doing it with substance: paddock activations, branded product lines, a brand ambassador in Jessica Hawkins. Williams has an Official Men’s Grooming Partner, Wilkinson Sword. Sephora has dipped a toe in with Paddock Club glam bars. This category has a lot of room to grow.
The third is the least developed but still intriguing: athlete- or team-driven co-creation. We're already seeing this play out in other sports. Carmen Mundt, partner to George Russell, is launching a skincare brand called Barriers — the closest thing we have to this category in the F1 world. I’d love to see Sephora do an F1 or F1 Academy product collab.
Someone recently commented on my Reel announcing the Sephora news, saying:
“Academy is far too girly… Nike, Reebok, etc. would be much better and far more relevant. Until F1 Academy catches names like that, it can never become widely interesting.”
Woof.
First, Sephora is only one of close to a dozen F1 Academy sponsors. They join the likes of LEGO, Puma, AmEx, and Gatorade. Pretty good names to “catch.” Let's at least get our facts straight: only two of eleven official partners are beauty.
Second, the assumption that beauty and athletic credibility are in tension is itself the problem. Nobody questions whether a male driver's cologne deal undermines his lap times.
The saddest part of all this isn't the comment I got on my Reel. It's the female athlete who talked herself out of a deal she wanted and money she needed because she didn't want to be dismissed.
So when someone says beauty doesn't belong in F1, what I hear is a narrowness about what the sport is allowed to be. When we tell women that caring about how they look conflicts with being taken seriously as athletes or fans, we're not protecting the integrity of sport. We're just enforcing a very old and very boring idea of who sport is for.
F1 spent decades marketing itself to a very specific person. That person is still here. So is everyone else now.
There's also an argument that sport is actually the most compelling arena for a beauty brand. If your lipstick survives Ilona Maher's rugby match, or your mascara holds up through an F1 Academy driver’s qualifying, that's the most credible product testimonial a beauty buyer could ask for.
Beauty doesn't speak for all women. But it speaks for some, and they are a large, loyal, and valuable consumer base that any brand (or sport) would be lucky to have.
Anyway, this is all coming from a woman (me) who almost never wears makeup. But I'll be damned if "too girly" is a real critique.
A Conversation With Amy Mansell, Global Chief Partnerships Officer, ELEMIS
