I Smell Hundreds of Perfumes a Year—Merit’s New Fragrance Made Me Stop and Pay Attention

I’ll admit, I’m a self-confessed perfume snob—and I’m very particular about the type of fragrances I wear. I like to smell elegant, understated and expensive, which usually means something nuanced, beautifully balanced and difficult to immediately decipher.

So, when a makeup brand branches into fragrance, I’m always sceptical. To me, it can often feel like a commercial play to drive sales rather than an exercise in olfactory exploration and genuine brand enrichment. However, Merit’s first fragrance, Retrospect, was one of the few exceptions to this rule. Despite ultimately being a skin scent, it is incredibly complex and nuanced, opening with a burst of bergamot, pear and ambrette before settling into something softer, muskier and more lived-in. It’s also incredibly good value for the quality, with 30% fragrance oil and a price tag of £72.

Today, Merit revealed its second fragrance: New Wave. Ordinarily, I wouldn’t be rushing to try it, but after the success—and, frankly, the perfumery credentials—of Retrospect, I made a point of getting my hands on it. And it really didn’t disappoint.

First, the bottle. It’s the same molten, pebble-esque form as its predecessor, complete with that distinctive thumb-dent, but New Wave has been given its own identity with a slightly different lid and warm, golden juice.

Next, the fragrance itself. New Wave is an amber, but if that immediately makes you think of something powdery and sweet, you'd be mistaken. Yes, the amber character is apparent almost immediately, with a distinct vanillary warmth, but it's cut through by the dry, herbaceous quality of angelica seed. It’s slightly earthy and almost medicinal, stopping the amber underneath from becoming too plush or predictable.

This tension makes sense when you look at its construction. Master perfumer Dominique Ropion and perfumer Meabh McCurtin took the historic Ambre 83 accord, with its rich, resinous, vanillic character, as their starting point, then worked to make it feel lighter and more contemporary.

As it settles, the edges soften and orange flower starts to come through, but not as an overtly pretty white floral. Instead, it's more of a resinous floral: warm, slightly honeyed and almost balsamic, with the flower kind of absorbed into the amber rather than sitting on top of it. Ylang-ylang adds to that solar warmth, but I find the orange flower much easier to identify on my skin.

Then comes the dry-down. The sweetness recedes and the woods, ambroxan and other amber materials come to the fore, leaving behind something smooth, dry and distinctly ambroxy. There’s still a trace of that original warmth, but by this point it feels less like classical amber and more like warm skin against dry wood.

The base itself is extensive. Benzoin, labdanum, olibanum and patchouli sit alongside ambrofoam, ambroxan and musk; earthy cypriol and vetiver; tobacco; cedarwood and oakwood; then vanilla bean and tonka bean. On paper, it sounds as though it should be overwhelmingly rich. On skin, it’s remarkably controlled.

For me, this is where New Wave stands out. It doesn’t progress neatly from bright top notes to a floral heart and finally a heavy amber base. The amber is there from the beginning; it's everything around it that changes. This feels particularly apt given it was initially inspired by an afternoon at the Musée Picasso in Paris, where the Merit team became interested in Cubism and Surrealism—and, specifically, the idea of knowing artistic rules well enough to break them. Ropion and McCurtin have essentially applied the same principle to classical amber perfumery: retaining its richness and sophistication while playing with the way we expect it to unfold.

New Wave is also an extrait de parfum, and its longevity reflects that. It has impressive presence when first sprayed, but it isn’t one of those fragrances that enters a room before you do. Instead, it develops slowly over several hours, becoming warmer, woodier and more intimate as the day goes on.

Retrospect was the fragrance that made me think that Merit deserved to be taken seriously as a perfume brand, and New Wave has confirmed it. The two smell very different—Retrospect is softer, muskier, and more intimate; New Wave is warmer, richer, and more assertive—but both show the same attention to composition.

At £79, it represents exceptional value for this level of perfumery. But more importantly, New Wave doesn’t smell like a fragrance created to capitalise on a successful beauty brand. It smells like the work of two very accomplished perfumers who were given enough room to make something genuinely interesting. And, for a perfume snob like me, that makes it a very easy recommendation.

Launching 22nd October on meritbeauty.com