Hidden Gem Museums in Los Angeles

You'll need to take a healthy sense of humor and curiosity to this weird and wonderful museum because it will leave you trying to decide what's fact or fiction! Don't be put off by its location in the less-than-ritzy Palms District of Culver City or the odd-looking storefront because this almost Dickens-style "curiosity shop" of a museum is stuffed full of believe-it-or-not exhibits that runs from the Jurassic Age (or so the museum claims) to eye-popping artifacts made by modern technology. Here are a few examples: relics of tools said to be created 150 million years before the advent of humans; a sculpture of the Pope created from a single human hair; microscopic collages of flowers and other objects made from butterfly wings; and an exhibit on Dogs of the Soviet Space Program (and I'm not pulling your tail...). Weird and wacky, but a lot of fun!

Open Thursday to Sunday, entry $5 donation.

If you like cars, you'll love the Petersen Automotive Museum—a turbo-charged temple to the automobile from the first Model T Ford to today's Formula 1 super cars and concept cars of the future. Located at 6060 Wilshire Boulevard, in the iconic former Ohrbach's department store (which is worth seeing in itself), the museum has three levels of exhibition space laid out in lifelike dioramas and settings of early Los Angeles to the present day. The permanent exhibits feature more than 150 rare vintage and classic cars, trucks and motorcycles, as well as a collection of famous celebrity and movie cars. There's a terrific Family Discovery Center to stimulate children in the science of automobiles, and a technology and auto-design section. The museum was founded in 1994 by Robert Petersen, who launched Hot Rod and Motor Trend magazines, a man who knows what's under the hood!

Open daily except Monday, entry $10 adults.

Any museum designed to challenge, confront and ultimately help stamp out racism, prejudice, bigotry and inhumanity is a winner in my book and a visit to the fascinating Museum of Tolerance, based in West Los Angeles, will surely move you to tears. Opened in 1993 as the education arm of the acclaimed Simon Wiesenthal Center, dedicated to the famous Nazi hunter, the museum uses interactive and hi-tech exhibits as well as artifacts, documents, photos, and highly personal stories from survivors to help visitors understand the Holocaust from a "then" and "now" perspective. Some of the volunteers are actual survivors while other interactive and hands-on displays and discussion groups actually make you feel part of the events of World War II.

Open daily except Saturday, entry $15 adults.

While most people head for the newer Getty Center in Brentwood, filled to the rafters with one of the world's greatest collection of European masterpieces, the older but equally extraordinary Getty Villa in Malibu is an eye-popping testament to what one man's unbridled wealth can create, not only in an art collection but in the museum itself. Built by oil tycoon J. Paul Getty on his Pacific Palisades estate in 1974, and renovated in 2006, the Getty Villa not only houses 44,000 Greek, Roman and Etruscan treasures—about 1,200 of which are exhibited at any one time—but is designed on the majestic Villa dei Papiri, near Pompeii. View the antiquities then marvel at the vast Roman and Greek-style complex, complete with a central pool, mosaic floors, vast pillared galleries, marble stairs and landscaped gardens. The galleries are laid out in themes: Gods and Goddesses, Dionysos and the Theater, and Stories of the Trojan War, all spectacular in their scale and depth.

Open Thursday to Monday, entry free (parking $7)

If you've always been fascinated by perfume—where they originate, how they are made, and who designs the exotic bottle shapes and beautiful packaging—head for the Annette Green Perfume Museum, located at the Fashion Institute of Design and Merchandising in South Grand Avenue, and you'll find all the answers. Green has been a doyenne of the global perfume industry since the 1960s, rising to become President Emeritus of the Fragrance Foundation and amassing a vast collection of perfumes which she first launched as a museum in New York in 1999, before moving it to its current location in Los Angeles in 2005. Designed as an Art Deco cosmetics counter in a fictional department store, the museum exhibits over 2,000 scents and bottles from every major fragrance house and "star" designer spanning more than a century, as well as a memorabilia, photographs and packaging. Tip: stop by the museum shop for a unique perfume bottle of your own.

Open Monday to Friday, entry is free.