Some people think Christmas is the most stressful holiday of the year, but I would beg to differ. As an adult, Halloween has certain expectations of creativity and effort that can feel stifling — I blame Heidi Klum for setting the transformative standard so sky high. Anyone who thinks holiday shopping is bad need only go to Party City the weekend before Halloween for a taste of the blood-thirsty costume madness.
If, like me, the process of deciding on a costume in the first place fills you with dread, Google has a clever answer: The Costume Wizard. The Wizard, built into the search engine's annual Halloween site, Frightgeist, delivers up ideas in seconds. For your part, you need only decide between a classic and modern style, select the levels of spookiness and uniqueness, and choose if you want something that's trendy on a national or local scale. Then, through a foggy cloud of digital smoke, your costume match appears onscreen.
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The Wizard sources its ideas from Google Trends data, inputting the most searched for costumes from September and October. For that reason, the ideas aren't the most clever. (If you want pun-ny inspiration, look elsewhere.)
I also found that when I cranked up the uniqueness and spookiness, the ideas — evil jester, Kylo Ren, and Wolverine, to name a few — weren't all that unique. Then again, we live in a world where "sexy poop" is a costume, so maybe you don't want something unique after all.
For those feeling indecisive or overwhelmed, the Wizard delivers an easy solution. You'll have to figure out how to put the costume together on your own, but at least there's no shortage of YouTube makeup tutorials and DIYs to help there. If you need something to get you in the right mood, just break out the fun size candy bars.