Interested in reviews on the Sephora website for waterproof makeup, Connie Ye figured she might as well scrape all of the reviews and filter for the ones that mention crying:
I ended up scraping about ~5k reviews, and 105 of them mentioned crying, sobbing or tears, giving a ratio of about 1/50. This is of course a biased number because the products the reviews are for are meant to withstand water, but I was still surprised to find so many. I was also surprised by how confessional and emotional people were willing to be in their reviews; I saw stories about breakups, death of loved ones, weddings, fights and more. However, despite the tragedy underlying many of the stories, the tone was often strangely positive, providing exuberant praise for the product that allowed them to maintain their makeup throughout the tragedy.
I have no idea what I would do with this dataset, but I feel like someone can figure out a worthwhile use.
You can also browse through the reviews using Ye’s straightforward viewer.
