Diptyque is a French luxury candle house known for its complex, sophisticated scents and premium pricing. Here’s how the brand performs in the Candlegraph index (see methodology for details on SAV and PAE):

Introduction

A Diptyque candle was the first luxury candle I ever owned, and it was the brand that got me into scented candles in the first place. Or at least the one that led me down the rabbit hole into my current obsession. It also played an instrumental part in turning just lighting candles into my other obsession of data collection and analysis. I’ve burned more than a few Diptyque candles at this point, although I’ve only documented a handful using my current methodology. When I first began keeping track, the brand came strong out of the gate, even using my initial methods of only measuring burn time versus price. Now I’m curious to know how well it holds up against those earlier trials.

Before this project started, I enjoyed scented candles as much as the next person - well, maybe a bit more than the next person - but the thought of taking measurements had not yet crossed my mind. As I’ve mentioned, I wanted to increase my Excel skills, and candles just so happened to be there. The very first candle I measured was one from Paddywax Apothecary, probably because it was the most recent candle I had purchased. The scent was Patchouli and Tobacco, and it’s one of the candles in my first presentation, so I’m sure I’ll have a separate post about it somewhere down the line. While I don’t burn candles every single day anymore, at the time, I was deep into my new obsession and quickly went down the data-gathering rabbit hole. Soon, I had recorded information about burn times, price, and weight from five different candles, and it was time to start making some of my favorite things - charts and graphs.

First, we’ll load in our libraries. I’m using library(here) on the advice of Jenny Bryan from her Project-oriented workflow post on Tidyverse. This is just to organize my project into a folder in order to keep it self-contained and portable.

# loading libraries
library(readr)
library(dplyr)
library(tidyverse)
library(here)

Next, we’ll load in the data. This comes from 4 tabs of a Google Sheets file on which I’ve recorded my candle research. Variables include things such as the price and weight of a candle, as well as how long it burned.

When I first started this project, I had no idea what I was doing, and I didn’t even know it would turn into a project. I just wanted something fun to work on while trying to figure out how adults use Excel. That is, for something other than just organizing a collection or making a schedule. It turns out that’s all a lot of people use Excel for, and there’s nothing wrong with that. Still, I wanted to take advantage of all spreadsheets have to offer, and using the data I was already gathering (but not yet recording) seemed like a good place to start. I figured that doing something fun alongside my Excel education would keep me interested and motivated, and in that I was correct. In fact it ended up growing into something much more, but in this post I want to focus on how it all began.

Hello, and welcome to Candlegraph! My name is Terry, and I love scented candles. They’re a great way to turn your house into a warm and inviting home. However, not all scented candles are created equal, which is the idea behind this site.