The Surprising Reason People Are Giving Yankee Candles Bad Reviews On Amazon

Candle lovers love Yankee Candles. This New England-based candle brand is discussed all over the internet and generally agreed to be one of the best scented candle brands out there, so much so that entire articles have been written just for the purpose of ranking the thirty best scents the company has ever made (via Wide Open Country). As such, one would generally expect that customer reviews of Yankee Candle products would be generally positive, and for the most part, they have been that way for a long, long time. 

However, if you've been reading reviews of Yankee Candles on Amazon during this month of December, you might have noticed an increase in negative reviews, in which purchasers of the candles are complaining that their favorite candles no longer have the room-filling scent power that they once did. While your first assumption might be that the company may have put out a bad batch of candles, there may actually be another explanation altogether (via Business Insider).  

Nick Beauchamp, who works as an assistant professor of political science at Northeastern University, noticed this uptick in complaints and decided to start tracking them. He began charting the complaints on the top three selling Yankee Candles on Amazon and found an interesting correlation; he watched the claims of "scentless" candles increase week after week, at the same time that cases of COVID rose intensely across the nation (via Business Insider). The sharpest spike in negative reviews, in fact, happened this month of December, the same time that COVID cases also saw a sharp spike thanks to the Omicron variant. 

Loss of smell, also known as anosmia, is such a common symptom of COVID that it has become a defining symptom of the illness that medical professionals ask about when trying to determine whether a patient indeed has COVID. In can take a long time for a person to regain normal sense of smell even after all other symptoms and active infection have long abated, and so Beauchamp wonders if this is the reason so many people can't smell their Yankee Candles as strongly as they usually do. A full inspection would have to be done of all the candles in question to be sure as correlation is not necessarily causation, but it would certainly make sense!