An Unexpected Covid Side Effect: People Leaving Bad Reviews for Scented Candles Because They Can’t Smell Them
Photo by Katy Warner via Flickr.
One telltale side effect of a Covid-19 infection is a loss of taste and smell, and during this pandemic year, there has been a noticeable increase in the number of complaints on shopping sites by customers unhappy that they cannot smell their scented candles.
A number of Twitter users noticed the situation, and several even analyzed the data.
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
Poe’s law is amaaaaaaazing pic.twitter.com/PzsLD5cpxk
— Tim Pierce (@qwrrty) November 26, 2020
Kate Petrova, a research assistant in the psychology department at Bryn Mawr College, looked at the Amazon reviews for scented and unscented candles over the past few years, and posted several tweets with the data visualization.
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
Petrova noticed that the reviews were relatively stable from January 2017 to January 2020, but then “there was a sharp drop between January and November 2020.”
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
In contrast, reviews for unscented candles didn’t show the same decline.
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
Petrova also found that there was a slight uptick in the number of the negative reviews mentioning a lack of scent.
Since the beginning of this year, the proportion of reviews mentioning lack of scent grew from < 2% in January to close to 6% in November. These numbers may not seem like much, but the trajectory of no-scent reviews over the last 11 months is certainly an interesting one 7/n pic.twitter.com/K5wEuM0boo
— Kate Petrova (@kate_ptrv) November 27, 2020
London-based PhD student Moritz Wagner found a similar trend in the UK Amazon reviews for perfumes.
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
