“That’s the trouble with first impressions,” says a snooty country-club lady to Marge Simpson in my favorite episode of The Simpsons. “You only get to make one.”

My first impression of Merit Beauty wasn’t great. Merit is one of the many beauty brands that have popped up in Sephora and Ulta and Credo in the last five years, promising “clean” ingredients and streamlined collections of easy-to-use products. Forget giant eyeshadow palettes, these brands whisper seductively. Forget glittery lip toppers and duochrome blush toppers. Forget the layered, contoured, highlighted, setting-sprayed, drag-inspired excesses of a decade ago. Life is hard and everyone’s tired, and the new generation of beauty brands is catering to our mental and spiritual exhaustion with messages and images like these:

Earth tones. Sheer lip balm. Bare, medium-length nails. “Simplify what it takes to get ready.” Even the word “merit” conjures a common-sense approach to makeup. We’re mature women now; we choose our products based on their merit, not on their virality or flashiness. Don’t we all want to live in a meritocracy where the deserving are rewarded?

But wait. Who gets to decide which beauty products have “merit”? Can a product not be glittery and high-quality? I don’t like the conservative-coded implications of Merit’s messaging, or the bland aesthetic it accompanies, or the fearmongering MAHA vibes of the “clean beauty” industry. I also don’t like Merit’s assumption that its customers are blundering novices who need help navigating the aisles of Sephora:

Ugh, that’s so condescending! I understand that eccentric beauty geeks like me are not Merit’s target audience, and that many women are just looking for a few uncomplicated, natural-looking products that they can wear to their kid’s graduation or their company’s Christmas party. I too was once a wide-eyed ingénue, scanning the Laura Mercier display in Princeton’s Bluemercury for a lipstick that would give me a little color without looking like, you know, lipstick. But Merit’s phrasing feels actively disempowering: “Don’t bother trying to develop your own aesthetic; you’ll just fail anyway. Leave it to us.”

So you think I usually mess up my makeup? Thanks.

YOU WERE FOUNDED IN 2021, BITCH!

So Merit made a bad first impression, but I didn’t write off the brand entirely. After hearing good things about its flagship lipstick, which it calls “Signature Lip,” I bought the shade Fashion back in October 2023…

…and, alas, I was disappointed. The formula was as lightweight as promised, but that didn’t make it comfortable; it just sat on my lips without doing anything for them physically or visually. The clunky packaging took up too much space in my lipstick box. The plum color that had looked so vibrant in Sephora’s lighting turned drab on me. I write all this in the past tense, but I actually still own Fashion, because I failed to take advantage of Sephora’s return window. Second impression of Merit: also a bust.

This past January, though, I was in Sephora yet again, searching for a cool pink cream blush more vivid than the light bubblegum pinks that have been trendy for the past few years, and my eye lit on one of Merit’s four new shades of Flush Balm.

L-R: Bespoke, Lusitano, Le Bonbon, and Postmodern, in crappy too-warm store lighting:

Le Bonbon (right) swatched next to Westman Atelier Poppet, also in store lighting, but closer to the window (i.e. more color-accurate):

This third impression of Merit was positive enough that I bought Le Bonbon just a few days later (the Flush Balms are $30, but I was lucky enough to have a gift card from my birthday in November). And despite my lingering distaste for Merit’s branding, Le Bonbon has been one of my favorite new beauty products of 2025. So let’s leave the snark behind and get into the review.

The Flush Balm box is a dark blue-gray with gold lettering, very “quiet luxury” or whatever they’re calling it on TikTok:

The packaging is unique: a domed blush (itself very bonbon-like) encased in a gold plastic cylinder with a transparent beige screw-off cap. I’ve traveled with Le Bonbon a couple of times, and the cap hasn’t cracked or come off in my bag. The gold-and-beige color scheme feels a little tacky to me, but it’s not anything I can’t overlook—or diminish by placing the blush near a fancy candle and some Henry James novels.

I’m so curious about that gorgeously smooth dome of pink. Is it hollow or solid? Is there a trinket or talisman inside? If you’ve ever finished a Flush Balm and can satisfy my curiosity, please comment below.

Le Bonbon is a hard shade to describe. It looks different in warm and cool lighting, but it’s basically a bright neutral-cool fuchsia without the slightest hint of brown. (Lena assures me that it’s a perfect True Winter pink.) It reminds me of these roses I photographed earlier this year:

Here’s Le Bonbon with three other pink cream blushes, clockwise from left: Fenty Strawberry Drip, Milk Rally, LBB, elf Bora Bora:

Swatches in indirect (top) and direct sunlight, L-R: Strawberry Drip, Bora Bora, Le Bonbon, Rally:

Let me acknowledge the obvious: Le Bonbon and Rally look almost identical in the photos above. The blended-out swatches below are truer to their actual appearance on my cheeks:

Here you can see that Rally (left) is a touch lighter and warmer, more “work-appropriate,” while Le Bonbon, true to its name, has a distinct candy-like brightness. Do you need both? Probably not. Do I need both? Of course I do.

The Flush Balm formula is a delight to play with. It’s fragrance-free, lightweight, and dewy, without the gritty silicone you find in so many cream blushes these days. I like to swipe the entire dome across my cheek and then blend out the product with my fingers.

As you can see from my extremely scientific diagram below, Le Bonbon is one of the moistest cream blushes I own, second only to Illamasqua Zygomatic:

On the left side are the stiff and/or powdery cream blushes, the ones that apply best with a stippling brush. On the right side are the slippery and dewy (or, as Temptalia used to say, “emollient”) cream blushes, which can be applied and blended out easily with fingers. I tend to prefer the wetter formulas—I don’t wear foundation, I have dry skin, and I enjoy the sensation of finger-painting my face—but there’s a tradeoff. In general, drier blush formulas last longer on the skin. The more smoothly a cream blush applies and blends, the more quickly it fades. My about-face Cheek Freak blush in Score, a bright purple, stays visible on my cheeks all day. Le Bonbon is almost as bright as Score, but I can’t trust it to stick around for more than a few hours, even if I apply two layers. I have no idea how anyone wears the lighter shades in the Flush Balm formula, like Stockholm or Beverly Hills, without taking the product along for touch-ups during the day.

I’m also concerned about Merit’s “clean,” i.e. preservative-free, formula. How much time will I have with Le Bonbon before it expires? My Merit lipstick in Fashion, now twenty months old, looks and smells fine, and my cream blush from Tower 28, another “clean” brand, is still going strong after more than four (!) years, so maybe I don’t need to worry too much. Still, the sooner Americans stop fretting over “toxins” and start vaccinating their kids for measles again, the better.

In the photo below, I’m wearing just one layer of Le Bonbon. Applied lightly, it looks surprisingly natural:

Generally, though, I like to wear two layers. The photos below will show you how different Le Bonbon looks in cool and warm light. Here I am wearing it in January, along with ColourPop Super Shock Shadow in Rooftop Cocktails and NARS sheer lipstick in Roman Holiday. In winter, the natural light was cooler-toned than it is now, and my skin was paler:

And here it is last week, in summer light, on my slightly darker skin:

My eyeliner here is my trusty Urban Decay Mushroom, and my lipstick is Maybelline Crimson Race, which I should really wear more often, lined with NYX Slim Lip Pencil in Fuchsia:

In my opinion, the best cream blush formulas on the market are Milk Lip + Cheek and Fenty Cheeks Out, both of which fall into the sweet spot in the middle of the spectrum—soft enough to blend out with my fingers, solid enough to last a good long while on my cheeks. Merit Flush Balm is just below those two in my hierarchy of blushes: I wish it didn’t fade so quickly, but I love everything else about it, and I’d consider buying another shade if there were one that interested me (and if I had another gift card, because $30 is a bit steep). At least my third impression of Merit was a good one.