I admit I didn’t believe MERIT’s claim that I could get a complete beauty look in five minutes. Still, this luxury beauty brand has edited the products needed offering the Five Minute Morning Core Collection and The Completion Set (Skin, Color, & Bronzer).
To begin, MERIT offers breathable light-to-medium coverage with a foundation containing fatty acids that condition skin and lock in moisture. There is also Sea daffodil extract. It helps diminish the appearance of pigmentation and dark spots. Is MERIT part of the new healthy skin trend in makeup? Or has the brand been in front of the massive shift in the beauty business to create healthy products because products are vegan, certified cruelty-free by Leaping Bunny, EU-compliant, and Clean at Sephora?
The brand was started in 2017 when Katherine Power, still pregnant with her son, posted a short Instagram video of her five-minute beauty routine, and the world took note. At first, MERIT Beauty was a direct-to-consumer product available on meritbeauty.com, but in January 2021, the products moved to Sephora in-store and online.
“I felt compelled to create a brand that would reimagine luxury beauty for modern consumers like myself by making it cleaner, well-edited, accessible, and beautiful,” says Power. “Merit is the antidote to the overwhelming, saturated world of beauty with too many steps and 50 shadow palettes launching every week. It’s built around the concept of minimalist beauty and the fact that we just want to look like ourselves, but better.”
The MERIT Signature Bag (automatically ships free) is reusable, washable, double-lined, and built to last. MERIT is about streamlining the process with products designed to be buildable and impossible to mess up. The company focuses on its impact on Mother Earth to eliminate as much virgin material as possible from its packaging and components.
MERIT is about streamlining the process with products designed to be buildable and impossible to mess up. The company focuses on its impact on Mother Earth to eliminate as much virgin material as possible from its packaging and components.
And MERIT is a clean brand that uses non-toxic ingredients, both natural and lab-created. It’s important to note that there is no regulated definition of “clean” beauty. To that end, the company focuses on safe and effective ingredients, whether natural or synthetic. In this pursuit, they have eliminated many potential irritants, like added artificial fragrance. In creating the products, they partnered with Biba de Sousa, a longtime Hollywood favorite aesthetician on their coveted complexion products, who is famous for her “no-list” — another 73 ingredients that are clean but potentially inflammation or acne-triggering (like coconut oil).
How popular is MERIT? A product is sold every 17 seconds through their direct-to-consumer website and has been tagged on social media worldwide. MERIT is shaking up the industry and is worth every penny.