The rise and the fall
Twenty-two Halloweens of US Google searches. Keep scrolling and the line draws itself.
Halloween's quieter. Sexy's quieter still.
Halloween costumes
Searches, 2025 against 2021
Sexy costumes
Searches, 2025 against 2021
The gender gap is closing
Sexy women's costume searches for every sexy men's costume search.
Mike
Forget the sexy firefighter. America searches for Magic Mike.
The shops didn't get the memo
It was only ever a fad
So, why?
The data shows what changed, not why. These are the explanations that fit it best.
Inspiration moved off Google
Characters took over
Men joined in
How we measured it
We compared US Google searches for sexy costumes with searches for Halloween costumes, every month since 2004, using Google Trends. The headline figure divides sexy costume searches by Halloween costume searches for September and October each year. "One in eight" means there was roughly one search for a sexy costume for every eight searches for a Halloween costume. Not every sexy costume search is for Halloween (some are for bachelorette or theme parties), so it is a ratio rather than a strict share.
Google Trends scales each query 0 to 100. We ran the two terms on their own, for full detail, and together, to fix the ratio between them. Google changed how Trends collects data in 2011 and 2016; comparing two terms in the same query is less affected than raw volumes, but figures before 2011 come from a smaller sample and are approximate.
Costumes, gender, books and shops
The costume cards chain 40 costumes through a shared reference term ("sexy nurse costume") so they share one scale, and compare September and October 2023 to 2025 with 2016 to 2019. Gender figures use searches that name the gender ("women's", "ladies", "men's", "male"), a small slice of all costume searches. Books data is Google Books Ngram, American English corpus, case-insensitive, to 2022.