The popularity of Yankee Candle on Amazon may be the latest indicator of COVID’s nationwide expansion.
The scented-candle brand is being bombarded with negative reviews from customers who recently made purchases from the company through Amazon.com. These customers claim that the candles have a barely detectable fragrance or no perfume at all.
However, while many reviewers rated the candles five stars and said the candles had a powerful perfume that reminded them of Christmas trees, others said they could not smell anything or only smelled burning wax.
“I’ve previously purchased this candle, and the scent would fill the entire room. There isn’t much perfume to this one. boo, boo, boo, boo, “According to a review published on December 20 for Yankee Candle’s balsam and cedar aroma.
“Except if you face-plant into the glass bowl, there is absolutely no aroma at all. I burned it for eight hours and, voila, there was no scent “On the 19th of December, another reviewer wrote in.
However, it is possible that the candles are not the source of the problem. Customers who have lost their sense of smell, which is a symptom of COVID-19, may have been affected.
Anosmia, or the inability to smell, has emerged as one of the most distinctive signs of COVID. While some people report regaining their ability to smell after recovering from COVID, others describe being unable to smell for months, or even a year, after being exposed to COVID for unknown reasons.
Northeastern University assistant professor of political science Nick Beauchamp compiled a list of the most common complaints about the top three Yankee Candle products on Amazon.
He kept note of when the unfavorable reviews first appeared and how much the number of complaints climbed each week. His graph showed a high jump around December, which coincided with the emergence of the Omicron variety, which caused a new wave of COVID cases in the United States.
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Yankee Candle did not immediately react to Insider’s request for comment on the negative customer ratings on their website.
There has been a spike in viral outbreaks in the past, which has been predicted by candle reviews.
After conducting research at Bryn Mawr College over the winter of 2020, Kate Petrova discovered that reviews of the top scented candles on Amazon dropped by approximately one full star between January 2020 and November 2020, with the proportion of reviews that stated the candles had no scent more than doubling during the same period, according to Christopher Ingraham of the Washington Post.
Nonetheless, both Beauchamp and Petrova have stated that, while this data appears to be evidence of a COVID increase, it should not be interpreted as scientific research in the traditional sense.
“I’m not going to take this too seriously,” Beauchamp wrote on Twitter. When looking at percentages, there appears to be a seasonal increase in “no scent” cases each winter, according to the researchers.