Los Angeles. In this city of fallen angels, fantasy reigns. In On the Road, Jack Kerouac wrote, “LA is the loneliest and most brutal of American cities.” It’s the city Woody Allen’s character describes in Annie Hall as the place where “the only cultural advantage is being able to turn right on a red light.” But they come, the dreamers, for the sunshine and the possibilities, to this land of opportunity, where hope springs eternal. Whatever they seek—happiness, love, money, fame—temptations draw them ever closer to this concrete paradise. Does Los Angeles have a scent? It's impossible to say. But Chandler Burr knows Los Angeles. And Chandler Burr knows perfume. So we decided to collaborate on a fragrance that an LA woman might wear. And we named it after Chandler's novel, set in Los Angeles. And you, dreamers, with your dreams: they may bloom, they may wither, but you don't give up. You keep coming, or think about coming, and sometimes you stay. Because someday, someone may be looking for you, pointing you out, wanting you. Or someone just like you. “A few years ago I wrote a novel called You Or Someone Like You, set in Los Angeles. Its central character is a woman, Anne Rosenbaum, who lives in the Hollywood Hills with her husband Howard, a movie studio executive. Like many houses in the curves and fantastic canyons of the hills, they look out toward the skyscrapers of downtown LA and the concrete ribbon of the 101 Freeway, through Mid-Wilshire and Robertson, the glass towers of Century City, and, on clear days, beyond the 405 to Santa Monica and the Pacific blue ocean. And always the palm trees, imported and planted in LA in the early 20th century, 'just as I am an import,' Anne observes, 'now naturalized.' Anne is English, born in Hammersmith, London. “As many have said, Los Angeles isn't a city. It's a state of mind. A strange amalgamation of places and languages. Los Angeles is rivers of concrete freeways and endless stretches of asphalt, traffic, and yet one of the most beautiful places in the world: a natural beauty shaped by nature and by people, with cobalt skies and the greens and ochres of desert parks, ocean fog, white jasmine, and pale yellow honeysuckle climbing up parking signs that read 'Permit parking only. Violators will be towed.'” “This perfume is very specific. When Etienne de Swardt approached me to creatively direct a fragrance named after my novel, I told my perfumer, Caroline Sabas, that we were creating the perfume Anne would wear. She is also very specific. English, cold and precise, surrounded but untouched by the materialistic machinery of the film and literary industries, somewhat distant. You Or Someone Like You is not “the scent of LA” or “the smell of the Hollywood Hills.” It’s not one of those olfactory synecdoches. It is, instead, stylistically and in its technical construction, what a Los Angeles woman would wear, in my opinion. Caroline and I discussed this every step of the creative process. It’s contemporary, 21st-century. It’s LA, whatever that means, though it partly means the standards a fragrance would follow at an agency meeting near Wilshire, in a studio, at lunch in Bel Air, or at dinner on Beverly Drive. (The ingredients are completely irrelevant. The work is the work. If you need to know what it’s made of, don’t wear it; You is not for you.) My fictional Anne wears it; and presumably thousands of other women do too. It represents Anne only to the extent that all our choices represent us. What it means to you is up to you, obviously. — Chandler Burr You Or Someone Like You is a welcoming fragrance: neither strange nor rejected. It's a contemporary creation built on timeless materials. She embodies the women of LA—someone like Anne Rosenbaum: cold and precise; once a foreigner but now naturalized; very exposed to the dreams of the Hollywood silver screen, but untouched by its materialistic machinery. Anne finds solace in literature and in the garden of her home, nestled in the hills overlooking downtown Los Angeles. This fragrance represents us only to the extent that our choices represent us. It can be concrete, like a beautiful green rose. Or it can be abstract, like an Erik Satie composition: a puzzle so mysterious it's difficult to decipher. The perfume stimulates the senses with its inviting freshness. Wearing it makes you feel good. — The Perfumer