About Us

Thin Wild Mercury draws from the many vibrant cultural eras of Los Angeles and New York, eliciting at once the factually historical and the purely fantastical.  In a 1978 interview with Playboy, Bob Dylan described his 1966 seminal album Blonde On Blonde as having "...that thin, that wild mercury sound." While Dylan found the inspiration for this spirited description of his work through his band's lively, uninhibited performances of it at the time, ours is rooted in the illustrious history of the famous coastal cities; their renowned neighborhoods and hangouts and the nowadays fabled eras of their 20th century lifespan – told aromatically. 

Our fragrances are imagined and formulated in LA's Los Feliz Village neighborhood since 2017.  Cathleen Cardinali is a veteran luxury retailer turned perfumer by way of LA's Institute for Art and Olfaction and a healthy dose of scrappy self-learning, she had a curiosity to tastefully create something that did not exist but had the feeling of something classic. Anthony Polcino is a lifelong musician turned designer with a need to see good ideas become realities. Together the husband & wife duo realized Thin Wild Mercury through a simple, traditional ethos of the masters: do it yourself.

TWM's fragrances are like nuanced stories redolent of particular places and times of the past eloquently told by musings from the present. The result is something like a state of mind for the senses – for anywhere, anytime.

All campaign photography shot by "our fifth Beatle" and creative companion since our inception, Kristin Gallegos.