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Merit will release its second fragrance, New Wave L’Extrait de Parfum, on 22 October through its own website, with a 30 ml bottle at $92 and a 9 ml size at $34. Created by master perfumer Dominique Ropion and Irish perfumer Meabh McCurtin, the amber-led extrait arrives two years after Retrospect, the debut scent from the make-up and skincare brand founded by Katherine Power.
Philippe Pinatel, Merit’s chief executive, says Retrospect is now the brand’s number-five SKU, with customers buying it an average of four times in two years. A 2022 customer survey had put fragrance at the top of the list of products shoppers wanted from Merit, and the answer was an extrait with nearly 30 per cent fragrance oil, double the concentration of most perfumes. New Wave holds the $92 price at which Retrospect launched in 2024. The smaller bottle works out at about $3.78 a millilitre, against roughly $3.07 for the 30 ml.
Merit describes the scent as a warm, spicy floral that builds into a deep, sensual base. Lawlor wore a sample for two months in an unlabelled vial and fielded a steady run of questions about her fragrance that she was unable to answer. On first spray, she finds it intense. She calls it notably different from Retrospect, which she describes as a punchy extrait leaning on vintage perfumery and wrapping the wearer in powdery warmth, and says anyone expecting an overtly feminine floral will not find one. Retrospect, created with Paris-based perfumer Fanny Bal, ran from aldehydes and pear through a jasmine and rose heart to a vanilla and moss base.
New Wave’s top pairs Madagascan pink pepper with Siberian angelica seed. Orange flower from Tunisia and ylang-ylang from Madagascar sit over a honey floral accord in the heart. The base runs long: benzoin, Spanish labdanum, olibanum, Indonesian patchouli, ambrarome, ambroxan, musk, cypriol, vetiver, a tobacco accord, American cedarwood, French oakwood, and Brazilian vanilla bean and tonka bean.
Ambre 83 gave the perfumers a rich, complex foundation, and Ropion calls it one of the great classical amber structures in perfumery. The work, he says, was making it luminous and contemporary so that the composition keeps revealing new facets as it wears. McCurtin says Amber is so familiar a structure that the team reached for brighter ingredients and a more current construction, hence the name Neo Golden Amber.
Labdanum, the leathery material at the centre of a classical amber, runs through the composition. Ropion says ambroxan and the lift of the top notes keep it from turning dense or smoky.
McCurtin describes the intended wearer as someone with a strong sense of self and personal style who wants a fragrance with presence and character.
The custom bottle takes visual cues from Surrealist art and is designed to evoke the gentle movement of a wave. The brief behind the scent looked to travel and nature as well as Surrealist art, and centred on personal power and optimism with a sensual streak.
Merit began in January 2021 as a minimalist colour cosmetics label and reported more than $100 million in sales in 2023. It grew from a website into an ongoing partnership with Sephora, and skin care came first outside colour, with Great Skin Instant Glow Serum in 2022. Retrospect followed in 2024 after more than 200 rounds of development, launching on Merit’s website and at Sephora, with a sample in every web order and scent strips in Vogue and Real Simple. It landed in a market where fragrance was the fastest-growing US prestige beauty category, with dollar sales up 12 per cent in the first half of 2024.
Merit has used waitlists before: at its 2024 launch, the Great Skin Priming Moisturizer drew 15,000 names and went straight into the top 10 moisturizers at Sephora North America. Pinatel describes Merit as a multicategory, lifestyle-led brand whose strongest territory remains the face. New Wave departs from Retrospect’s launch in one respect, debuting direct-to-consumer, and a waitlist is open on Merit’s website ahead of 22 October.
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