Before the Factory, there was incense: tracing Andy Warhol’s scent origin

I love the idea that one of the most modern noses in pop culture was formed in a very old room. Before cameras, parties, and soup cans, there was a pew. For Andy Warhol, it started with smoke.

He attended weekly mass with his mother in a Byzantine Catholic church in Pittsburgh. Candlelight, vocal chants, and the visible curl of resinous incense turned faith into a full-sensory installation. Fragrance culture writer Jessica Murphy pinpoints this as the beginning of his love of scent, and the connection feels right. You do not collect perfume bottles by accident. You get imprinted by the first place scent made the air feel alive.

I remember my own first church incense as a child - resin that stuck to the throat, gold dust on black coals, the hush when the aroma rose. That is where perfume stops being mere grooming and becomes performance. Warhol grasped that staging early. The nave was his first gallery, the censer his first diffuser.

Think about the materials that likely shaped his baseline: frankincense, myrrh, labdanum, benzoin. These are the bones of modern amber and resinous accords, the same warm-mineral glow perfumers still chase. Incense teaches patience and buildup. It softens hard edges. It fills space with emotion. That is also a Pop trick.

Warhol’s famous love of objects feels less like collecting for collecting’s sake and more like building a private iconostasis. Perfume bottles are secular reliquaries. Line them up and you get repetition, reflection, a chorus of glinting shapes. He turned the ordinary into an altar, and scent into a memory machine.

When I smell an incense note today, I hear that distant chant again and imagine Warhol’s shelves at dusk, glass catching the last light. His lifelong obsession with perfume makes perfect sense if you start where he did. Before the Factory, there was ritual. Before celebrity, there was smoke.