Valentine’s Day: I loaf you!

Valentine’s Day is associated with Saint Valentine, the patron saint of beekeepers and people suffering from the plague. However, the connection between Saint Valentine and love celebrations can be traced back to the English poet Geoffrey Chaucer, who wrote the first recorded connection between love and Valentine’s Day in his poem, Parlement of Foules, in the late 14th century. The modern-day celebration of Valentine’s Day is primarily driven by industries that benefit from it, including stationery, chocolate, flowers, and jewelry.

Some (Fun) Facts!

• Consumers celebrating Valentine’s Day in 2023 are expected to spend an average of $192.80. They spent an average of $175.41 on Valentine’s Day in 2022;
• Consumers ages 35 to 44 plan to spend an average of $335.71 in 2023 — the most of any age demographic;
• 57% of Valentine’s Day shoppers expect to buy candy, making it the most popular gift category in 2023.

What does the Data say?

Using no-code visualization and Python, we built a Noteable data notebook to look into some historical data.

View Data, Code & Analysis in Noteable

Let’s look into the Total Spending Trends.

Valentine’s Day has become a major commercial holiday in the modern era, with retailers selling millions of cards, gifts, and other products. Despite its commercialization, it remains an important day for many people who use it to show their love and affection for their partners, friends, and family members.

We notice on this controversial dual-axis line chart that despite the percentage of people celebrating Valentine’s Day going down significantly from 63% to ~52% in 2022, the Total Spending kept increasing over the year. Inflation, marketing, and excess are definitely to blame here!

Flowers on Valentine’s Day

Valentine’s Day offers the perfect opportunity to get creative and send flowers that will have the people you love to make them feel special! But what types of flowers to send? IPSOS conducted a poll on February 15m 2022, on behalf of the Society of American Florists. For this survey, a sample of roughly 1,005 adults aged 18+ from the continental U.S., Alaska, and Hawaii was interviewed in English.

In the case of Multi Select questions, the number of responses may exceed the number of participants, which can cause the response percentage to exceed 100%.

This year I went with Pink roses and mixed flowers. Always a safe bet? Red roses are still too cliche for me to like it. We all have our preferences!

Shine bright like a diamond!

On Valentine’s Day, ~30% of men plan to buy jewelry, against 14% of women. It’s noticeable that there is a consistent increase in women buying jewelry for Valentine’s day from 2020 to 2022. Maybe women have been so disappointed by what they received that they decided to buy it themselves! Who knows?

Interestingly ChatGPT says women generally buy more jewelry than men. When asked for its sources, ChatGPT quoted two surveys from 2019 and 2020. Aren’t we all just relying on surveys at the end of the day?

Dating and Valentine’s Day

How should you handle dating on Valentine’s Day? Dating is difficult nowadays. COVID-19 didn’t help. Apps and websites such as Hinge, Rinder, OkCupid, Bumble help some. For others, it’s even more challenging to adapt to this new way of finding your loved one.

In 2016 researchers released profile data on 70,000 OkCupid users without permissions. It’s controversial as they scrapped the data without authorization. Scrapping is a big deal. The tech giants are using this technique every day to compete in the market, but at the same time are suing potential new entrants or companies trying to build businesses around scrapped data. Here’s the paper about the OkCupid dataset: https://openpsych.net/paper/46/.

If we use the dataset that Okcupid allowed everyone to use. We can look at some interesting data points around the free-form text content submitted by users. I built 18 world clouds, such as the one below. Expected words are repeated from Love, People, Friends, Work to Smile, Want, Life, Travels, Books… Feel free to explore the data yourself.

If we look at the user profiles split by gender, we realize that men generally describe themselves as athletic, average, and fit in terms of body type v. average, fit, and curvy for women.

Another interesting data point is the drinking and diet habits based on their age. The Dimension Matrix above shows us that the youngest men are Halal (Diet) x Not at all | Socially (Drinking Habit) closely followed by Vegan | Vegetarian (Diet) x Desperately (Drinking Habit) if you wonder, like me, what Desperately means, here’s a Reddit thread about it! The distribution is quite similar among women.

About Dating App, do more matches mean a better chance of finding the one?

Adam Halper looked at how many millennials found someone on Tinder by asking students from various universities a set of questions that would enable us to look at the percentage of matches per user profile and to answer the simple question of their Tinder adventure ending up in a “serious” relationship.

Tinder is an online dating app founded in 2012 and one of the most popular apps in the world. It is serviced in almost 200 countries with more than 6 million paying subscribers.

With regards to the dataset, it contains barely around 500 rows and seven attributes, including an identifier. It’s difficult to draw any conclusions, but the summary chart below shows the % of matches split by the outcome of the relationship.

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