Girl of the Year.

Thin Wild Mercury's New York Collection arrived in 2023 with a single question: what does a moment feel like? Cathleen Cardinali built Girl of the Year around that intangible thing, the scent of someone who just left the room. Not their perfume, not the cliché of an absence. The real thing. The leather jacket still warm on the sofa. The ashtray nobody emptied. The vanity cluttered with evidence of a life being lived, not curated. The fragrance translates that feeling into something you can wear, lingering long after you've left the same room yourself.

The trick is in the lipstick note, it's not the expected sweet or fruity interpretation. Instead, Cathleen Cardinali built it as a powdery warmth, something that reads almost like vintage face powder worn close to the skin. Combined with the burning incense, it creates an opening that's immediately intimate, personal, like walking into a room where someone just finished getting ready. The smoke doesn't compete, it deepens. Takes the buttery warmth and turns it into something with edges. The fur note in the base is the real surprise: animalic without aggression, giving the drydown a skin-close quality that makes the whole composition feel like a second skin rather than a coating. That's the differentiation.

The opening lands fast, lipstick's powdery warmth immediately present, the incense burning bright. Two minutes in, something shifts. The buttery quality doesn't disappear; it deepens under a slow veil of smoke. The leather arrives not as a sudden punch but as a gradual weight settling in, like a jacket being picked up from a chair. By the third hour, the smoke has fully integrated with the leather, and the first hints of the base begin to surface, sandalwood's creaminess threading through the darker notes. The drydown is where this fragrance earns its reputation. The orris root brings a powdery violet-like quality that bridges the smoky leather and the warm sandalwood beneath. The fur note appears in the final stages, soft, animalic, intimate. On skin, expect 6-8 hours depending on your chemistry. On fabric, it can exceed that, which means the scent of this fragrance becomes an artifact, something you find in a jacket pocket days later, in a room you haven't visited in a week.

Girl of the Year sits in the territory of the divisive, the specific, the remembered. Users describe it as an olfactory artifact of the indie sleaze era, the years of glitter, rooftop cigarettes, and smudged lipstick against a thumping Yeah Yeah Yeahs soundtrack. The combination of powdery lipstick and smoke is unusual enough that it attracts strong reactions, which is exactly what the brand intended. Rather than trying to please everyone, it attracts a specific person who wants a fragrance that tells a story without explaining itself. The discontinued production has only strengthened its cult appeal.