Team USA star Ilona Maher is known for her red lipstick both on and off the field.

The 27-year-old, who recently won a bronze medal, even shares a post on her Instagram bio about her fondness for glamour: “Probably wearing lipstick.”

For Maher, maintaining a sense of grandeur amid the dirt and chaos of rugby is a valuable habit.

“I think it’s important to me because rugby has always been thought of as a very masculine sport, and (fans) stereotype people who play it,” she tells PEOPLE at the P&G House in Paris. “Me and all the girls who play sevens and fifteens, I think, are really breaking that stereotype.”

Maher, who uses Secret Outlast deodorant to stay fit on the pitch, says looking and feeling her best while competing is another way of breaking down societal stereotypes around women’s rugby.

“We wear makeup because we want to and it makes us feel good and I think it shows that it doesn’t affect how we play on the field,” she says. “My lipstick doesn’t affect how hard I hit, how I read the game, how I run. It’s just something we do to say, ‘Fuck you,’ to the standards of what is considered a man’s sport.”

The athlete, who won a bronze medal with her rugby sevens team at the Paris Olympics on July 30, has long used her platform, which now has more than 3 million followers, to challenge sporting stereotypes and expectations for female athletes; last month, she silenced a TikTok commenter who criticized her weight.

“It’s important to me because I’ve gotten to a point where I’m very accepting of my body and appreciating it, but I know a lot of girls aren’t at that point, and it helps to see someone who is,” she says. “For me, it’s important to do that consistently because they’ll watch one video about BMI and feel really good about themselves, but three videos down there’ll be something that makes them feel bad. I’ve done videos about cellulite, BMI, and being called a man. It’s important to me that it never just happens in one video.”

Maher also stresses the importance of a strong support system to perform at his best, including his parents, his two sisters and, yes, Secret, who released an ad featuring Maher and his teammates in June.

“They would recognize us even if we didn’t win a medal,” he says. “For them to want to do that, they saw the value in us and believed in us, whether we were winners or not.”

Maher says he hopes young girls will see the advert and give rugby a try.

“I hope they say, ‘What is this? What are they doing there?'” she says. “And then maybe they say, ‘Mom, what’s going on there? I want to try this.'”

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