Even if you’re not a rugby fan, you probably know the name Ilona Maher: The center for USA’s Women’s Eagles Sevens has racked up over one million followers on TikTokwhere she does everything from sharing inside looks into pro sports (who can forget her poking fun at the infamous “anti-sex” beds in Tokyo’s Olympic Village?) to putting female beauty standards on blast. (Case in point: posting a photo of her own cellulite to prove “we all have it.”) And if you hadn’t heard of her before, you may well soon: She’s set to represent the US once again on the biggest athletic stage in the world.
Three years after she made her Team USA debut at the Summer Olympics in Tokyo, Maher is preparing for another round of Games. When she spoke to SELF in late May, she and her teammates were playing their last tournament of the season—in sunny Madrid—before they’d head home to kick their Olympics training into high gear. Less than a month later, on June 17, the official women’s rugby sevens roster was announced—and Maher was on it. Soon, the team will fly to France to spend a week at a pre-Olympic training camp in Tours, a city a few hours’ drive from Paris. “This helps you acclimate to the time difference, the weather,” Maher says. Then, it’ll be on to the City of Light to rub shoulders with the rest of the world’s top rugby athletes.
With the Paris Olympics looming—the opening ceremony is on July 26—Maher says she’s both excited and a little nervous. But she’s made peace with her butterflies. “I think it’s okay to be a little nervous. It means you care,” she says.
One thing that helps her feel at ease going into huge competitions like this? A well-packed bag of must-haves that she can rely on to offer comfort no matter where she goes.
“Even though you’re going to play rugby and it’s going to be tough, you want these little things that give you that escape or still [make you] feel like yourself,” Maher says. That’s why her personal list of essentials includes several skin and beauty products—she’s previously called lipstick her “war paint.” After all, she says, athletes are more than just their workout. “They want to take care of their skin, feel beautiful, and feel good about themselves,” Maher says. “And that’s something that’s really important to me because being an athlete is such a small part of who you are.”
Here’s what would be in Ilona Maher’s Self-Care Survival Kit.
1. Some serious skin protection.
We play in so many different climates, and we need to protect our skin, wherever it is. We go from places where the UV index might be two to others where it’s much higher: We’ve played in Sydney, where it was a 12 or whatever it gets up to. For sunscreen, I use Sun Bum or something else with a really high SPF, like 50. We’re training, we’re sweating, so we want something that stays on.
