MERIT

It started with a phone propped up in a bathroom. In 2016, entrepreneur Katherine Power posted a short clip of herself doing her makeup in about five minutes, concealer stick, an old lip tint dabbed on as blush, and the response was immediate and outsized. That throwaway video, posted in the era of twenty-shade palettes and elaborate contouring, quietly mapped out a brand: minimalist, clean, and built for people who want to look like themselves, only better, fast.

Power, a serial founder whose ventures span a fashion-media company and a natural wine label co-created with actor Cameron Diaz, launched MERIT in January 2021 with a tight edit of seven products, among them The Minimalist complexion stick and the Flush Balm cheek color. The formats were the point: intuitive, hold-it-like-a-pen tools designed to be applied without brushes or skill. The brand scaled fast, raised a sizable Series A, and by its fifth year reported around two hundred million dollars in retail sales, notably, as the company likes to point out, without relying on a viral-product playbook.

It has since stretched beyond color into fragrance and skin, and brought in a veteran beauty-industry CEO as Power moved to chairperson, the usual signs of a young brand maturing into an institution.

The honest read: MERIT is genuinely well-made, with a coherent point of view and clever, foolproof formats that deliver exactly the polished, no-makeup-makeup look they promise. The clean label, though, is marketing rather than meaning; there's no regulatory definition of the term, and clean doesn't equal safer or more effective. And as a makeup-forward brand only a few years into its skincare and fragrance expansion, its track record in those categories is still thin. For an effortless five-minute routine in tasteful packaging, it earns its following; just buy it for the formats and the editing, not for the wellness-coded language around them.

Sources:[1][2][3][4]