Halloween is one of our favorite times of the year and It's one of the best times for sports betting for sure, with NFL, NBA, NHL, and the World Series betting all going on around the same time. 

With a plethora of sports available, the best betting apps provide an abundance of options to choose from! And then there's the spookiest night of the year which brings more than enough pressure when it comes to choosing your costume. It's a big decision, not to be taken carelessly. 

So, as we approach Halloween 2023, Bookies.com will show you for the second year in a row what the most popular Halloween costumes this year are across the country.

Our sports betting experts usually review the top online casinos and betting apps for promotions and wagering. So for this exercise, we knew we needed a credible source to give us the intel: Step forward, Google Trends. Here's how we did it. 

Methodology

We used Google Trends data to find the most popular related queries associated with the 'Halloween Costume' search term. We narrowed our pool by state and only used searches taken from the last 7 days and last 30 days, allowing us to find the searches that have jumped in popularity over the lead-up to Halloween 2023.

We used the 'top' related queries associated with 'Halloween Costume' to find the most popular searches, as well as the 'rising' related queries to figure out which terms had seen the biggest jump in search frequency this year compared to previous years.

Google Trends defines 'top' search terms and 'rising' search terms as follows:

• Top - The most popular search queries. Scoring is on a relative scale where a value of 100 is the most commonly searched query, 50 is a query searched half as often as the most popular query, and so on.
• Rising - Queries with the biggest increase in search frequency since the last time period. Results marked "Breakout" had a tremendous increase, probably because these queries are new and had few (if any) prior searches. 

Here’s a look at the map, based on the most popular Google Searches within the term 'Halloween Costume', broken down by searches per state.

What's The 2023 Most Popular Halloween Costume?

We all know the unofficial colors of Halloween are black and orange, but this year’s annual night of dress-up is going to have a different hue everywhere you look: Pink. It’s no surprise that Barbie and Ken will be this year’s most popular costumes.

The major motion picture starring Margot Robbie, Ryan Gosling, Will Ferrell, and a host of other A-list actors and celebrities surpassed $1 billion at the box office in August—just two months after releasing—and is continuing strong into October, still ranking in the top-15 at many box office websites.

It makes sense, too. Not only was it a major success thanks to some unprecedented marketing and hype, but people also have hundreds of different versions of Barbie to choose from when dressing up—Stereotypical Barbie, Rollerblading Barbie (a good way to maximize your trick-or-treating hours), Western Barbie, Mermaid Barbie, and…the list goes on and on.

So, we weren’t surprised to see that 40 of the 50 U.S. states and Washington D.C. ranked Barbie among their top Google searches over the last 30 days. Whether you’re looking pretty in pink (it goes with everything) or on the men’s side looking cool as the other side of the pillow in your Ken costumes, we’re going to see plenty of it in a few weeks’ time.

But we said 40 states, not all of them. And there was an interesting trend we uncovered in our data. 

The Southeast is not feeling Barbie as much as the rest of the country. Of the 11 states opting for something different, Alabama (Taylor Swift), Arkansas (The Incredibles), Louisiana (Witch), and Mississippi (Clown) all opted for something different. 

The West was also well represented in diverting from the traditional pink path, with Idaho (Princess), Nevada (Fairy), North Dakota (Rabbit…seriously), and Utah (Super Mario) all looking elsewhere for their Halloween costumes.

Will We All Be On Barbie Land For Hollow's Eve? 

The rest of the non-Barbie top searches? Missouri (Princess) and New Hampshire (Angel).

There’s another side to the story, too. While Barbie littered the search results over the last 30 days, we noticed an interesting trend in the rising results over the past seven days—none of them were Barbie. Whether people are just interested in going off the beaten path or perhaps realizing their costumes are going to match every one of their friends, every state is looking elsewhere most recently.

Though the four states truly could not be farther apart geographically, we’d love to see if Hampshire (Luigi) and Vermont (Super Mario) could team up against Kentucky (Bowser) to go save Hawaii (Princess Peach).

We’re personally happy to see that the Joker is still going strong, with Alaska, Rhode Island, and Wyoming having it as their top search (we hope it’s the Heath Ledger version, but Joaquin Phoenix or Jack Nicholson will work, too).

One that surprised us was Men In Black, with four different states (Washington D.C., Nebraska, New York, Oklahoma, and Oregon) all ranking it highest.

It’s probably a good thing Indiana (Cruella Deville) is far away from Connecticut (Dalmatians), and we were glad to see that there are still some classics left in the searches such as mummy (Louisiana), hippie (Maryland), Jason (Ohio and Texas), Freddy Kruger (North Dakota and Illinois), and Beetlejuice (Delaware). 

Whereas Wednesday Addams was a huge search term for us last year, it’s the mom’s turn in 2023, with Morticia Addams ranking highest in Kansas, Idaho, and New Mexico.

Last but certainly not least, we need to talk about Massachusetts. When we first saw the term “Siren” pop up in our results, we thought maybe it was the loud, red, blaring light. Upon closer examination, it turns out that Siren is a Greek mythological creature known as the goddess of earth and spring. 

She’s half bird, half woman, who lured sailors to crash their boats by the sweetness of the songs she has sung. It’s pretty cool—and we suppose it makes for a pretty incredible Halloween costume—but we don’t fault anyone for going the easy route and putting a few holes in a bedsheet and calling it a day.