As a child, Roger Dupré’s mother applied so much cocoa butter to protect him from the Swedish winter that he remembers shining in all his class photos. Later, as an international model, he noticed a lack of skincare designed for deeper skin tones. He launched Melyon in Stockholm in 2020. At the heart of his first formulas is baobab oil—a nod to his family’s Ghanaian and Togolese roots.
Roger Dupé was born in 1991 in Västerås, Sweden, to parents from Ghana and Togo. In his family, skincare was a form of self-respect passed down from West Africa. His mother was especially mindful of hydration. During the Swedish winters, she would generously apply cocoa butter to his face. The result, he recalls with a laugh, was that his skin systematically gleamed in his school photos.
Back then, Roger saw himself as a footballer. A knee injury changed his path. Around the age of 18 or 19, while shopping in Stockholm, two people started following him in a store. Thinking at first they suspected him of shoplifting, they had actually come to ask if he was a model. He kept their card for about two months before calling back. What followed were eleven years in fashion, working with the likes of Kenzo and Acne Studios.
It was also in the beauty aisles that the idea for Melyon was born. Roger noticed his own mother struggling to find products in Sweden suited to the needs of dark skin. In 2020, he launched a brand designed with these skin types in mind, while formulating the care to suit various skin tones and types. The initial routine was intentionally simple: Milk Cleanser, Detox Serum, Day Cream, and Night Cream.
Then, he turned to his roots to design the packaging. During a journey to West Africa, the baobab caught his eye. Its oil became the signature ingredient of the first products, and the tree's massive silhouette inspired the glass bottles, topped with their large, spherical caps. Roger explains that he wanted to quite literally translate the tree into a bottle.
