Don't Know What To Be For Halloween? Google's 'Costume Wizard' Can Fix That
If your family struggles with what to dress up as, Google has your back. Here’s what’s going on.
The weather is getting cooler, the leaves are changing color, and our kids are obsessing over candy and costumes. These are the hallmark signs we’ve firmly entered the Halloween time crunch, for better or for worse! Halloween is one of the more fun holidays for families, but there’s a lot of stress in trying to get our kids to pick a costume early enough to get it all sorted out, and not change it last minute. If your family is currently struggling with what to dress up as this spooktacular holiday, Google launched a website called “Frightgeist” that is giving a major lowdown on Halloween costumes to try out ASAP. One of those super cool tools is its “Costume Wizard.”
What Is Google “Frightgeist?”
Google knows a thing or two about Halloween — specifically, what costumes people are googling, what they want to know about the holiday, and where certain holiday costumes are the most popular.
This year, the company looked to its data to help parents and their kids narrow down what they should be for Halloween with an outstanding spooky website (with wonderful Halloween-style music in the background) called “Frightgeist.”
Of course, the site kept in mind what is trending and what might stand out. The first step was sifting through the data to find the top costumes for the year.
Google compiled several key insights to help you figure out a great Halloween costume: This includes figuring out the topics that spike every Halloween, compiling costumes that have seen a huge increase in searches, and popular couples costume ideas, trending costumes, most searched baby costumes, children costumes, and even dog costumes.
What Is The “Google Frightgeist Costume Wizard?”
All that data was then used to make life easier for you and help you find out what you should dress up as for Halloween with a handy, easy-to-use “Costume Wizard.”
To find out your last-minute costume idea, the wizard asks you to “adjust the gears below, and a Halloween costume will show.”
The first gear is the "spookiness level," pulling it all the way to the left would indicate zero spookiness, while the right would be all the spookiness. From there, you choose the style, whether you want classic or modern. Then the trend meter is national or local.
The final gear is the "uniqueness level," where pulling to the left means no uniqueness, and the right is 100% unique. The last step in the wizard is to click the submit button, where your suggestion will come up.
There have been cute suggestions like a rabbit, dragon, or bear. There are scarier suggestions like vampires, zombies, or aliens. There were also some costumes that play off of popular shows or movies like Toy Story and Stranger Things.
If you click on the suggestion that the “Costume Wizard” gives you, you’ll find out a bunch more information about the costume idea, including its national rank in costume popularity, the cities the costume is the most popular in, and more.
What Else Is On The “Frightgeist” Website?
That’s not all that’s on the website: You can see what costumes are trending nationally or locally in your area on Google search, what costumes are ranking the most popular nationwide or in your area, and check out an easy to read interactive map that shows where certain costumes are blowing up in popularity, which might help if you’re trying to look like everyone else or be one of a kind.
For example, Jackson, Tennessee residents are apparently loving Hocus Pocus costumes, whereas Seattle residents are furiously googling witch costumes. Meanwhile, folks in Phoenix, Arizona are all about dinosaur costumes.
If you need a Halloween costume or you need your kids to just choose something, give the wizard — or any other cool and ghoulish part of the site — a try!
