Scented Candle Reviews Are "An Unexpected Victim" Of COVID

COVID-19 has caused a lot of strife since the virus broke out worldwide earlier this year. One unexpected effect from COVID-19 has been the digital firestorm against scented candles manufacturers.

Kate Petrova—a research assistant in the Harvard Study of Adult Development—saw a tweet about people complaining on Yankee Candle’s website. The complaints pointed to a trend: people weren’t able to smell the candles.

There are angry ladies all over Yankee Candle’s site reporting that none of the candles they just got had any smell at all. I wonder if they’re feeling a little hot and nothing has much taste for the last couple days too.

— Terri Nelson (@TerriDrawsStuff) November 24, 2020

So Petrova investigated and found a connection between COVID-19 and negative scented candle reviews. She pulled data and wrapped it all up in a fascinating tweet.

I couldn’t just walk past this Tweet, so here is some fun #dataviz

Scented candles: An unexpected victim of the COVID-19 pandemic 1/n https://t.co/xEmCTQn9sA pic.twitter.com/tVecEiX5Jc

— Kate Petrova (@kate_ptrv) November 27, 2020

In follow-up tweets, Petrova went on to explain how she came to her conclusions. Her first step was downloading a random subsample of U.S.-based Amazon reviews.

First, I downloaded a random subsample of US-based customer reviews of the 3 most popular scented candles on Amazon. Between January 2017 and January 2020, the average rating stayed around 4.3/5, but there was a sharp drop between January and November 2020. 2/n pic.twitter.com/kpCRZ1StKZ

— Kate Petrova (@kate_ptrv) November 27, 2020

Next, she plotted out the reviews to see if they were related to one of COVID-19’s most common symptoms: loss of smell.

Could it be because of the COVID-related loss of smell? To investigate, I plotted the reviews of the 3 most popular unscented candles on Amazon*, and the difference was quite striking 3/n

*One thing to note: fewer reviews are available for unscented candles than for scented ones pic.twitter.com/D9NdknJJAU

— Kate Petrova (@kate_ptrv) November 27, 2020

She quickly noticed that since the beginning of 2020, customer satisfaction rates for scented candles were dropping at faster rates than unscented candles.

Since the beginning of 2020, customer satisfaction with scented candles has been dropping at a much faster rate compared to unscented candles. 4/n pic.twitter.com/LULlUh9P6W

— Kate Petrova (@kate_ptrv) November 27, 2020

Good data to go off of, but Petrova wanted to dive deeper. So she dug into the reviews and created a function that flagged all reviews that mentioned lack of scent.

Now, most people were rating their candles without taking the time to write a detailed review, so I expanded my sample to include top 5 scented candles from 4 different brands. 6/n

— Kate Petrova (@kate_ptrv) November 27, 2020

And the results are really interesting.

So, if you are doing any virtual Black Friday shopping today, and if you still have your sense of smell, maybe buy a scented candle and leave a nice review. And no, I don’t work for a candle company. I just like looking at data. 8/n

— Kate Petrova (@kate_ptrv) November 27, 2020

Petrova even got one Twitter user to look into similar data in the U.K.

Very cool! I just did a quick UK amazon perfume version. Not as nice as yours, but a hint of signal may be there too 🙂 pic.twitter.com/78xUmvnyV9

— Moritz Wagner (@MoritzWagner20) November 28, 2020

Lesson learned: if you can’t smell a scented candle, get tested for COVID-19.