Scents of P.L.T.O: Turning Everyday Life and Unknown Worlds into Perfume from Indonesia

I realized that if we only played it safe, we would become just one of many brands.

Steven Yoshi

Scents of P.L.T.O is a fragrance brand born in Indonesia. Its former name was Scents of Pluto. The name Pluto expressed the idea of imagining the smells of a world not yet known. Founder Steven Yoshi, who started out collecting perfume, develops unexpected subjects into creations that can be worn on the skin. From forests on a distant planet to a familiar barbershop and banana flowers, his work moves between imagination and everyday life.

Key Information
The Founder and the Brand’s Origins
What Defines the Brand
Additional Note
References

Key Information

Brand name: Scents of P.L.T.O
Former name: Scents of Pluto. The current name has the same pronunciation
Country of foundation: Indonesia
Year established: 2024 (the brand’s official account; its company profile specifies January of that year)
Founder: Steven Yoshi. Anindita Ningtyas also participates as a co-founder
Official website: Scents of P.L.T.O

The Founder and the Brand’s Origins

From Collecting Perfume to a Brand of His Own

Yoshi was a perfume collector. He established the brand to create fragrances that suited his own tastes. His aim was not to follow other perfumes but to make scents whose difference people would notice when trying them. To that end, he chose to collaborate with French perfumers as well.

The name “Pluto” also follows this direction. What Yoshi wanted to invite was imagining the smell of Pluto. It does not mean recreating the actual planet’s scent; the name is a way to extend the imagination toward a world not yet experienced. He also looked at subjects outside conventional perfumery, such as smells recalling paint.

In other words, we want to bring imagination to the fore.

Steven Yoshi

Yoshi’s interest is not limited to choosing unusual names. Lost in the Italian Sea, inspired by the Italian seaside, depicts the sensation of sunbathing on a beach. Not That Kind of Cherry draws on a scene like drinking a cherry cocktail at a bar with a hint of smoke. Rather than isolating one material, he seeks to include the place and time surrounding it in the fragrance.

An Indonesian Brand Founded in 2024 and Its Co-Founder

The brand was founded in Indonesia in January 2024. Its spelling changed from the former Scents of Pluto to Scents of P.L.T.O while retaining the pronunciation. It now describes itself as a “Modern Asian Fragrance House.”

Co-founder Ningtyas has worked in marketing at advertising agencies and technology companies. After roles at Tokopedia and Bukalapak, Ningtyas became involved in the brand’s long-term direction, product development, and brand-building. A personal interest in scent sits alongside the work of bringing creations to people as a business.

In July 2024, Yoshi was introduced as a participant in Bank Saqu’s entrepreneur-development program, Solopreneur Academy. At the time, alongside perfumes, the brand also offered scented body washes and room sprays. It became one of three selected businesses in that year’s program. Yoshi expressed his pleasure at meeting and learning from fellow business owners and mentors.

From Jakarta’s Sales Floors to Readers Abroad

By March 2025, the brand had a physical store in South Jakarta and was also selling perfumes online. While its activities focused on the domestic market, buyers from neighboring countries also began to visit.

At present, our market is still Indonesia, but there are also many buyers from Singapore and Malaysia.

Steven Yoshi

At the ASHTA commercial complex in Jakarta, too, the brand was introduced as working with impressions of paint and jungle accords. An accord is a combination of several fragrance materials that creates a single impression. A retail space also gives people a chance to experience as actual scents ideas that can be difficult to convey through names and descriptions alone.

Yoshi values the moment when someone surprised by an unexpected smell nevertheless feels that they can wear it.

That is our territory: experimental, yet still loved.

Steven Yoshi

The brand currently has retail locations at ASHTA and Blok M in Jakarta. It turns subjects suggesting unknown worlds into perfumes for everyday use. Its work in exploring how the two can coexist is communicated both online and in stores.

What Defines the Brand

New Kind of Jungle: Depicting a Forest on an Unknown Planet

New Kind of Jungle was composed by Bertrand Duchaufour (in Japanese). Its subject is a forest on an unknown planet discovered during space exploration. In the brand’s story, as explorers set foot there, air recalling wet grass and lemon spreads around them; as they move farther in, waterside flowers and wild plants appear.

The fragrance layers a composition including watery hyacinth, honeysuckle, and blue tuberose with musk, moss, and modern woody notes. Rather than documenting an existing rainforest, it uses plant smells as clues to construct a forest that no one has yet walked through.

The form of the transparent green cylindrical bottle paired with a long silver-colored cap is also striking. The work’s name is placed simply on the front, while the contrast of green glass and metal visually suggests its subjects of plants and an unknown world.

Specimen Perfumes: Banana Flowers and Cotton Beneath Ice

Specimen 09 Banana Sambac arose from a collaboration with fruit brand Sunpride Indonesia and was composed by Vincent Ricord. Its opening centers on the vegetal impression of the flower part known as the banana heart. This connects to mango and jasmine sambac, layered with a quality suggesting prickly pear milk, vanilla, and driftwood impressions.

The work is not simply sweet banana turned into perfume. The brand sets out a story of “transformation,” in which nature merges with skin and flowers and fruits become the body. The perspective shifts from vegetal greenness to the fleshiness of fruit and white flowers.

Duchaufour’s Specimen 011 Cotton Juniper ventures further into fantasy. Cotton growing amid frost that never melts, and a cleanliness like frozen air taking shape: this image of an imaginary plant is layered with impressions suggesting juniper berries, cotton flowers, and clean linen, along with musk. Even under the same name, “Specimen,” meaning a sample, one imagines tropical plants and the body, while the other explores ice and fiber.

Di Bawah (Pohon): A Collaboration with a Barbershop

Di Bawah (Pohon) is a collaboration with the barbershop Dibawah Pohon. The fragrance was composed by Nanako Oda. Beginning with the feeling just after a haircut, it transfers the atmosphere of a barbershop into perfume.

It combines the sharpness of mandarin, the smooth impression of suede, and a barbershop accord. For Scents of P.L.T.O, not only fantasies such as space exploration but also everyday activities rooted in a place can become subjects for perfume.

Asian Archive: Reinterpreting Asian Subjects

The brand currently sets out to explore places, cultures, memories, and imagined futures from a contemporary Asian perspective. Inked Hinoki in Asian Archive Vol.01 is one expression of this direction. Composed by Steve Guo, it depicts Japanese hinoki by connecting it with paper, timber, and the stillness of an empty space.

From Indonesian plants and barbering culture to Japanese wood and space, the brand’s perspective extends beyond introducing fragrance materials from its own country. Reinterpreting the familiar and imagining the unseen: it seeks to accumulate both as an archive of scent.

Additional Note

The year of establishment is given as 2024, following current official information. However, KONTAN’s March 2025 interview with Yoshi gives the start of sales as 2023, and NOW! Jakarta’s interview also gives the founding year as 2023. The timing of the name change and the relationship between the start of business and the brand’s founding cannot be established from this difference in years, so they have not been linked as separate events.