IT'S now become well known that one of the symptoms of COVID-19 can be a loss of smell, and that is now believed to in turn had a unexpected significant impact on reviews of scented candles.
US-based Harvard Univeristy student academic Kate Petrova noticed a tweet from someone noting that there were "angry ladies" all over the website of a company called Yankee Candle, reporting that none of their Thanksgiving deliveries had any smell at all.
She did some investigation, using customer reviews of the three most popular scented candles sold by Amazon and finding that for the three years to Jan 2020 the average rating of the products was 4.3 stars out of five.
However since the beginning of the COVID-19 period customer satisfaction with scented candles has been dropping, she said, with her analysis finding "since the beginning of this year, the proportion of reviews mentioning lack of scent grew from <2% in Jan to close to 6% in Nov".
She said the results showed scented candles were an "unexpected victim of the COVID-19 pandemic".
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