Celebrity Name: Lexie Hull
Brand Name: Forta Cosmetics
Deal Type: Co-Founder / Brand Launch
Announced: March 31, 2026
Impact: Positions Hull as a leading voice in athlete-led beauty, expands her commercial footprint beyond endorsements, and introduces a new performance-makeup category aimed at sports and fitness lifestyles
- Lexie Hull co-founded Forta, one of the first athlete-led performance makeup brands, debuting with the $25 Lock & Go Setting Spray, a formula two and a half years in the making.
- The brand targets a real, unmet problem: makeup that vanishes during athletic warm-ups, using sweat-specific polymers not found in standard long-wear cosmetics.
- Hull is seeding the product to essentially the entire WNBA, plus gymnasts, soccer players, and volleyball players, using athlete-to-athlete word of mouth as the primary launch engine.
- Long-term ambitions include a Sephora retail partnership, with Hull already connected to the retailer through her involvement in the Unrivaled basketball league, which Sephora sponsors.
Lexie Hull, guard for the Indiana Fever, has stepped off the court and into the beauty aisle, launching Forta, a performance-driven makeup brand built for athletes who refuse to choose between looking great and sweating hard.
Co-founded with investor Sarah Guller, Forta debuts with the $25 Lock & Go Setting Spray, developed over two and a half years using polymers engineered to fight sweat, not just water.
Hull, who previously partnered with Glossier and competed in the Unrivaled basketball league, says the product solves a problem she lived firsthand: a full face of makeup gone before tip-off. It’s a relatable frustration, and she’s not alone.
Just as FlaUjae Johnson partnered with e.l.f. Cosmetics to bridge the gap between beauty and women’s basketball, Hull is going a step further by owning the brand entirely.
The launch strategy leans heavily on athlete credibility. Hull plans to seed Forta to nearly every WNBA player, gymnasts, soccer players, and volleyball players through athlete-platform Faves.
And like her recent KFC promotional partnership, Hull is proving she’s as comfortable building a brand off the court as she is locking down opponents on it.
The brand, currently DTC, has its sights set on Sephora’s Accelerate program, with more color cosmetics, including eye and lip products, already teased on the Forta website.
Takeaways
Lexie Hull isn’t just putting her name on a product, she’s building a category. Performance beauty has never had its Gatorade moment, and Forta is betting it can be exactly that.
The brand’s logic is tight: athletes wear makeup, makeup fails athletes, so build makeup that doesn’t. Simple, specific, and deeply personal.
What makes this move particularly smart is Hull’s existing positioning. With partnerships at Glossier and Sephora and a profile built through Unrivaled, she already has beauty industry credibility before the brand even ships its first bottle. That’s not luck, that’s a calculated runway.
The real test? Whether Forta can break out of the athlete niche and reach the everyday active woman who hits a spin class before work and wants her contour to survive it.
Can Forta do for performance makeup what Lululemon did for activewear and turn a niche athlete product into a mainstream wardrobe staple? As WNBA players increasingly cross into beauty founder territory, does this signal a permanent shift in how women athletes monetize their platforms?
