Etat Libre d'Orange You or Someone Like You is a collaboration between Etat Libre d'Orange and Chandler Burr, released in 2017 and created by Caroline Sabas.
Chandler Burr is the author of The Emperor of Scent and The Perfect Scent: A Year Inside the Perfume Industry in Paris & New York. He was also the perfume critic for The New York Times from August 2006 until the end of 2010. In December of 2010 he founded the Department of Olfactory Art at the Museum of Arts and Design in New York City.
Notes of mint, grapefruit, bergamot, anise, green notes, cassis, rose, hedione, and white musk.
From Etat's website:
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 gave it the name of Chandler’s novel, set in Los Angeles.
And you dreamers, with your dreams — you might flourish, you might wither, but you don’t give up. You keep coming, or you think about coming, and sometimes you stay.
Because someday, someone just might be looking for you, pointing at you, wanting you. Or someone 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 so many of the homes up the fantastical curves and canyons of the Hills they look down on LA’s Downtown skyscrapers and the concrete ribbon of the 101 freeway, across Mid-Wilshire and Robertson, the glass towers of Century City, and, on clear days, over the 405 to Santa Monica and the placid, blue Pacific. And always the palm trees, imported and planted in LA in the early 20th century, ‘just as I am an import,’ Anne observes, ‘now indigenous.’ Anne is English, born in Hammermith, London.
“As many have observed, Los Angeles is not a city. It is a state of mind. A strange amalgam of places and languages. Los Angeles is rivers of cement highways and infinite strips of asphalt, traffic, and despite or because of it all one of the most breathtakingly beautiful places on earth, a natural beauty made by nature and molded by people, cobalt sky and the greens and tans of the desert parks, ocean fog, the white and delicate pale yellow jasmine and honeysuckle flowers that grow up parking signs reading ‘Permit Parking Only Violators Will Be Towed.’
“This scent is very specific. When Etienne de Swardt approached me about creative directing a fragrance whose name would be the title of my novel, I told my perfumer, Caroline Sabas, that we were creating the fragrance Anne would wear. She is also very specific. Coolly crisply English, covered in but untouched by the silver, materialistic movie industry, literary, somewhat removed.
“You Or Someone Like You is not the ‘scent of LA’ or ‘the smell of the Hollywood Hills captured.’ It is not one of those olfactory synecdoches. It is, on the other hand, stylistically and in its technical construction what a Los Angeles woman would wear in my view. Caroline and I discussed this at each step during the creation process. It is contemporary, 21st century. It is LA, whatever that means, though in part it means the norms a scent would follow in a meeting at one of the agencies near Wilshire, at a studio, at a lunch in Bel Air or dinner off Beverly Drive. (The raw materials 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; so presumably do thousands of other women. It represents her only in the way all such choices represent us. What it will be to you is for you to decide, obviously.”
— Chandler Burr
Fragrantica - "Los Angeles is such a strange juxtaposition of concrete and nature, and I think that YOSLY grapples well with this. It most certainly has a fresh bite with a little herbaceous citrus, but soon falls into an urban rhythm of dried mint and a slightly floral musk. The mint is by far the most noticeable note over the life of this fragrance, and I find its longevity to be ~6 hours. As a bonus, I find that I can constantly smell this on myself; no skin scent here. It’s especially suitable for very hot days, as it smells “cool” and is never overpowering. I don’t think you could overdo it with YOSLY if you tried… Finally, this is most definitely a unisex fragrance..."
Fragrantica - "It smells like a delicious mint julep. So so refreshing and bright. This smell reminds me of my nana’s spearmint bush the morning after it rains or a picnic on fresh cut grass. Most mint perfumes smell like toothpaste to me but I enjoy this one a lot.'
Fragrantica - "MINT!! All comments that it smells like a mojito are accurate. Fresh mint, a bit of alcohol, a bit of citrus/green. I'd agree the opening has a whisper of tomato leaf – yum. Opens with a bang, settles nicely."
