Culture

The Most Popular Halloween Costumes of 2021

Published

2 years ago

October 29, 2021

Anshool Deshmukh

The Most Popular Halloween Costumes of 2021

Halloween—it’s the time of year when kids and adults alike dress up, eat candy, and show off their spookiest selves. It’s also when the scariest home decorations are the talk of the town, and people are frightened left, right, and center.

With the help of data from Google Trends and their unique Frightgeist series, we visualized the most searched Halloween costumes in the U.S. in 2021.

From spooky to sweet, these are the costumes everyone wants to dress up as this Halloween.

A Brief History of Halloween

Halloween is celebrated each year on October 31, with this year’s Halloween occurring on a Sunday. The tradition originated with the ancient Celtic festival of Samhain, where people would light bonfires and wear costumes to ward off ghosts.

The concept of Halloween didn’t gain popularity until it reached the United States. Borrowing from European traditions, Americans began to dress up in costumes and go house to house asking for food or money, a practice that eventually became today’s “trick-or-treat” tradition.

Other superstitions also started to form around the holiday. Young women believed they could divine the appearance of their future husbands by doing tricks with apple parings or mirrors.

Over time, Halloween moved away from focusing on witchcraft and ghosts to the festival we know and love today—a day focused on games, foods of the season, and festive costumes.

What Are the Most Popular Halloween Costumes?

With COVID-19 cases down compared to last year and Americans expected to spend over $10 billion on Halloween this year, much of the United States will be partaking in celebrating the spooky holiday.

From classy costumes and last-minute DIYs to pop-culture outfits and even era-inspired costumes, here are the top 25 most popular Halloween costumes in the U.S. in 2021.

Rank	Costume Name	Category
1	Witch	Horror Films
2	Rabbit	Animals
3	Dinosaur	Animals
4	Spider-Man	Comic Book Characters
5	Cruella de Vil	Film Characters
6	Fairy	Fantasy Characters
7	Harley Quinn	Comic Book Characters
8	Cowboy	Professions
9	Clown	Professions
10	Chucky	Horror Films
11	Cheerleader	Professions
12	Pirate	Professions
13	Pumpkin	Foods
14	Angel	Characters
15	Vampire	Fantasy Characters
16	Among Us	TV Charaters
17	Zombie	Horror Films
18	1980's	Era
19	Superhero	Comic Book Characters
20	Devil	Characters
21	Joker	Film Characters
22	Ninja	Professions
23	Squid Game	TV Charaters
24	Beetejuice	Horror Films
25	Doll	Toys

Notable Trending Costumes

The Netflix show Squid Game has had a meteoric rise in popularity in recent weeks, becoming one of the most-watched shows on the streaming platform—just in time for Halloween.

Squid Game costumes are the 23rd most popular in Google’s search, and they continue to trend high, being the most searched costume idea in Detroit.

In 2020, the mobile game Among Us was the talk of the gaming world, and this year it is the 16th most popular costume, with its popularity spiking in Jacksonville, Florida.

Other notable costumes in the top 50 include Pokémon at #50, Fortnite at #44, Velma Dinkley (of Scooby-Doo fame) at #42, Poison Ivy (the comic book villain) at #33, Beetlejuice at #24 and the entire 1980s decade at #18.

Most Popular Halloween Costumes by State

When it comes to festivals, every state has its unique perspective and traditions on celebrating them. This extends to popular Halloween costumes too.

Though there might be some overlap, digging deeper into the most popular costumes in every state allows us a unique look into how diverse people’s tastes are across the country.

Here is a breakdown of the most popular costumes in the U.S. in 2020 by state:

State	Most Popular Costume	National Rank in 2020
Alabama	Harley Quinn	03
Alaska	Beetlejuice	36
Arizona	Rabbit	04
Arkansas	Doll	12
California	Witch	01
Colorado	Dinosaur	02
Connecticut	Powerpuff Girls	32
Delaware	Doll	12
District of Columbia	Beyonce	333
Florida	Rabbit	04
Georgia	Witch	01
Hawaii	Monsters Inc	43
Idaho	Witch	01
Illinois	Dinosaur	02
Indiana	Witch	01
Iowa	Chucky	20
Kansas	Mickey Mouse	57
Kentucky	Zombie	13
Louisiana	Witch	01
Maine	Dinosaur	02
Maryland	Ninja	09
Massachusetts	Dinosaur	02
Michigan	Rabbit	04
Minnesota	Witch	01
Mississippi	Angel	06
Missouri	Dinosaur	02
Montana	Purge	15
Nebraska	Joker	30
Nevada	Witch	01
New Hampshire	Ninja	09
New Jersey	Witch	01
New Mexico	Clueless	74
New York	Dinosaur	02
North Carolina	Dinosaur	02
North Dakota	Star Wars	28
Ohio	Witch	01
Oklahoma	Dragon	35
Oregon	Fortnite	07
Pennsylvania	Witch	01
Rhode Island	Hermione Granger	146
South Carolina	Wonder Woman	31
South Dakota	Spider	38
Tennessee	Harley Quinn	03
Texas	Harley Quinn	03
Utah	Witch	01
Vermont	Deer	125
Virginia	Rabbit	04
Washington	Angel	06
West Virginia	Zombie	13
Wisconsin	Witch	01
Wyoming	Physician	67

A look at popular costumes at the state level reveals some interesting quirks. Montana, for example, is uniquely interested in The Purge, and Rhode Island trick-or-treaters are big fans of Hermione Granger of Harry Potter fame.

Traditions are Here To Stay

At its core, Halloween still remains that same old fright-inducing festival it has always been.

Even though pop culture might influence your Halloween choices, traditional costumes will always have a unique place in everyone’s heart.

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History

Visualized: The Daily Routines of Famous Creatives

The daily routines of 16 famous creatives—poets, thinkers, scientists and even politicians—are charted for comparison with each other.

Creator Program

Published

4 weeks ago

May 12, 2023

Pallavi Rao

A grid of donut charts showing how 16 great artists, writers, and thinkers spent their day, with colored slots accounting for work, leisure and sleep.

Visualized: The Daily Routines of Famous Creatives

What is the best daily routine to unlock creativity, or is there such a thing?

Many modern suggestions for optimizing creativity—like scheduling time for “deep work,” and building small, sustainable “atomic habits”—can be traced back to famous creatives in many different eras. And though they all found success, they employed different methods as well.

In this unique visualization, RJ Andrews from InfoWeTrust has charted how notable creatives in different fields spent their days. He picked 16 of the 161 “inspired minds” covered by Daily Rituals: How Artists Work, a book by writer and editor Mason Currey published in 2013.

How Much “Creativity Time” in Famous Daily Routines?

Dividing the day into 24 hours, Andrews denoted certain categories for daily activities like working creatively, sleeping, and other miscellaneous endeavors (meals, leisure, exercise, and social time).

For the creatives with a separate day job—Immanuel Kant and Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart—their ordinary labor is also counted in miscellaneous activities.

Below is a breakdown of the daily routine of all 16 people featured above:

Name	Occupation	Creative (hrs)	Sleep (hrs)	Miscellaneous (hrs)
Maya Angelou	Writer/Poet	9	7.5	7.5
W.H. Auden	Poet	11.5	7	5.5
Honoré de Balzac	Novelist	13.5	8.5	2
L.V. Beethoven	Composer / Pianist	8	8	8
Le Corbusier	Architect	8.5	7	8.5
Charles Darwin	Naturalist / Biologist/ Geologist	7	8	9
Charles Dickens	Writer	5	7	12
Gustave Flaubert	Novelist	10.5	7	6.5
Sigmund Freud	Psychologist	12.5	6	5.5
Benjamin Franklin	Writer / Inventor / Scientist / Statesman	8	7	9
Victor Hugo	Writer	2	8	14
Immanuel Kant	Philosopher	7	7	10
Thomas Mann	Novelist	8	8	8
John Milton	Poet	8	7	9
W.A. Mozart	Composer / Pianist	8	5	11
P.I. Tchaikovsky	Composer	4.5	8	11.5

The average and median amount of time spent on creative work for these individuals was just over 8 hours a day. At the extremes were two French novelists, Honoré de Balzac with 13.5 hours daily spent on creative work, and Victor Hugo with only 2 hours.

Interestingly, the allocation of creative work time was different in almost every daily routine. Maya Angelou’s routine resembles the modern work day, with the bulk of her writing between 7 a.m. to 2 p.m. Others like Kant and Mozart had creativity blocks when time allowed, such as before and after their teaching jobs.

Then there are outliers like Honoré de Balzac and Sigmund Freud, who worked as much as they could. Balzac wrote from 1:00 a.m. to 4:00 p.m. with just an hour and a half nap break in between, fueled by up to 50 cups of coffee. Freud split up his creative work into three different blocks: analyzing patients in the morning, consulting in the afternoon, and reading and writing journals into the late evening.

But somewhere in their days, most of these brilliant minds made sure to get a good rest, with an average of 7.25 hours of sleep across the board.

Schedule Yourself to Create Success

Creativity may ebb and flow, but these great minds had one clear thing in common: scheduling time for creative work.

The perfect daily routine was usually what fit in with their lifestyle (and their bodies), not based on an arbitrary amount of work. For example, night owls with later chronotypes worked late, while socialites and politicians found time outside of their commitments.

They also found time to move and enjoy life. Half of the people in the dataset specified exercise in their accounts—either leisurely strolls or fast walks. Many also scheduled social time with partners, friends, or children, often paired with a meal.

Perhaps the greatest insight, however, is that the day-to-day routine doesn’t have to look extraordinary to be able to create extraordinary work.

Much of the data is sourced from personal anecdotes by the artists themselves, or from biographers, researched and collected by Currey in Daily Rituals. In some cases, Andrews needed to assume habits — usually sleep — due to missing, or non-specific information.