Terri Nelson is a science illustrator and cartoonist from Portland, Oregon and she recently noticed that a ton of negative scented candle reviews have been flooding the web — and she wants to know why.
“There are angry ladies all over Yankee Candle’s site reporting that none of the candles they just got had any smell at all,” she wrote on Twitter. “I wonder if they’re feeling a little hot and nothing has much taste for the last couple days too,” she added, a reference to common coronavirus symptoms.
The tweet caught the attention of Kate Petrova, a research assistant with the Harvard Study of Adult Development at Bryn Mawr College, who decided to test the hypothesis by scraping roughly 20,000 reviews of the most popular scented and unscented candles on Amazon.
“It is rare, at least in my line of work, to stumble upon an anecdotal observation that can be examined using such vast amounts of easily accessible data,” said Petrova, who stressed that this was a personal project with no relation to her research work.
The results were incredibly clear: Before 2020, reviews of the top scented candles hovered between 4 and 4½ stars, year after year. Since January, however, those grades have fallen roughly one full star.
Unscented candle reviews, meanwhile, don’t show the same pattern.
To strengthen her corona connection theory, Petrova analyzed the reviews to see if they contained terms like “no scent,” “no smell” and “can’t smell,” indicating complaints about a perceived lack of scent. She found that the proportion of scented candle reviews containing these terms nearly tripled from January to November, from roughly 2 percent to 6 percent.
Representatives from Yankee Candle and Village Candle, two leading American candle manufacturers, told The Washington Post they haven’t noticed an increase in customer complaints during the pandemic.
The research and evidence surely makes sense and points to the possibility that many people who purchased scented candles and can’t smell them — may have had Covid without even knowing it.
Definitely interesting.