Monogenic wavelets offer a geometric representation of grayscale images through an AM-FM model allowing invariance of coefficients to translations and rotations. The underlying concept of local phase includes a fine contour analysis into a coherent unified framework. Starting from a link with structure tensors, we propose a nontrivial extension of the monogenic framework to vector-valued signals to carry out a nonmarginal color monogenic wavelet transform. We also give a practical study of this new wavelet transform in the contexts of sparse representations and invariant analysis, which helps to understand the physical interpretation of coefficients and validates the interest of our theoretical construction.