Merit Beauty Enters the Fragrance Category With Vintage-Inspired Scent

Fragrance was always in the cards for Merit Beauty — the minimalist makeup and skin-care brand began developing its signature scent after just six months in business. Nearly three years later, its first-ever perfume is finally here: Retrospect Extrait de Parfum, a vintage-inspired, concentrated fragrance blending floral heart notes with a warm musk base.

“We have always focused on slow intentionality and making products where we believe there’s white space,” Merit Chief Marketing Officer Aila Morin tells Fashionista. “And we believe very clearly that even with the increased momentum of fragrance launches this year, they’ve almost just made our point stronger on where the white space is on having something clean and nuanced and grown-up and long-lasting and high quality. That still doesn’t really exist in the market, and absolutely not at a $92 price point.”

With youthful body sprays and sweet-smelling gourmands currently filling the fragrance market, Merit sought to deliver a more mature option for its essentials-minded consumer by zeroing in on a transparent ingredient list, a luxurious scent profile and a long-lasting wear time. To achieve this, the brand crafted an extrait de parfum, rather than an eau de parfum or eau de toilette, given its high concentration of oil that lasts for up to 12 hours on skin.

As for the scent itself, Merit tapped French perfumer Fanny Bal to translate Merit’s aesthetic, balancing classic fragrance notes with the brand’s modern edge. With inspiration stemming from scents that reminded the team of their childhoods, Merit offered Bal an open-ended brief: “It was really just an interpretation of capturing a feeling,” Morin says.

The resulting juice features a base of vanilla, musk and moss, paired with a nostalgic nod to vintage perfumes via floral notes of rosemary, orris, jasmine and rose at the fragrance’s heart. Speaking to Merit’s modernity, Bal included top notes of aldehydes, bergamot, ambrette and pear. “It’s fresh, it’s not sugary, not sticky, but you need a touch of addiction, a touch of juiciness on the top for perfume,” Bal says of the decision to add pear top notes.

Then came the bottle design. With some consumers mistaking Merit’s Great Skin Instant Glow Serum for fragrance upon first glance, thanks to its frosted glass bottle and golden cap, Morin notes the brand wanted Retrospect to visually feel like a departure from previous products. The scent’s molten, melted-looking flacon was designed to fit in the palm of the user’s hand.

“The decision to do an organic shape actually was born of our adjacency to jewelry,” Morin says. “We’ve always been inspired by jewelry.” The fragrance’s packaging also draws on jewelry aesthetics; it comes in a case that resembles the design of a vintage watch box.

Following Merit’s strategy of “old-school craftsmanship, old-school marketing” for this fragrance launch, the brand is placing physical scent strips, an early-2000s marketing favorite, in Vogue and Real Simple. Along with offering 100,000 Retrospect samples at Sephora, Merit will also include samples of the scent in all orders placed on its direct-to-consumer website from Oct. 8 through Oct. 22. The fragrance’s emphasis on storytelling continues via a collaboration with The Gentlewoman: Merit teamed up with the publication to release a $52 coffee table book detailing Retrospect’s development as well as varying perspectives on fragrance.

As for its campaign, Merit tapped five female still-life photographers — Yudi Ela Echevarria, Hanna Tveite, Pia Riverola, Suzanne Saroff and Lauren Bamford — to lens Retrospect from their own perspectives, with the resulting photos appearing in the fragrance’s billboards.

In keeping with Merit’s emphasis on minimalism, Morin says the brand does not intend to expand its new fragrance category in the immediate future. “Maybe there’s a world where, after a year or two in market, if our client is asking us for something else, we’d consider doing it. But we really do believe that there is strength in a singular scent and strength in not going into the single-note scent wardrobes that [have] been popularized in the last few years,” she explains.

Retailing for $92, Merit’s Retrospect Extrait de Parfum launches on Oct. 22 on meritbeauty.com, sephora.com and in all Sephora doors. 

See all of the campaign images below.

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Source: Fashionista.com