“Smell can transport you out of wherever you are,” says Cathleen Cardinali, who left her job in the luxury fashion industry to co-found the California-based perfume brand Thin Wild Mercury with her partner, musician Anthony Polcino, in 2017. Place-based storytelling lies at the heart of its four scents, which offer distinct, multi-layered aromas that whisk wearers to another time—specifically, to moments from Los Angeles’s ’60s and ’70s rock-music milieu. “There has to be a narrative behind what I’m doing,” says Cardinali, who puts together the notes that inform each spritz, while Polcino creates corresponding visuals for the bottles and boxes. “It could be a photograph I saw, a song, or a house that I drove by. The vision in my head sets the scene.”