AR and AI Effects Like Those from YouCam Apps Redefine Halloween After Record-Breaking 176,000+ Digital Looks Tried On

From virtual vampires to AI-powered witches, Halloween fans are turning to technology for self-expression this spooky season, as consumers embrace technology to transform celebrations

NEW YORK--(BUSINESS WIRE)--Perfect Corp., the leading AI and AR beauty and fashion technology provider and developer of ‘Beautiful AI’ solutions and the creative force behind the globally popular YouCam suite of apps, with over 1 billion downloads worldwide, today announced its 2025 Halloween activations within its suite of YouCam apps – YouCam Makeup, YouCam Perfect, YouCam Video, YouCam Enhance and YouCam AI Pro, which include over 90 AI and AR-powered looks, avatars, fashion effects, and creative tools, showcasing how augmented reality and generative AI are redefining how consumers celebrate the spookiest holiday of the year.

Halloween Moves Online through AI and AR Effects

Halloween has always been a holiday of creativity, but in 2025, much of that transformation is happening in the digital space. With U.S. Halloween spending projected to exceed $13 billion this year according to Bloomberg, millions of consumers are choosing virtual costumes and AR-powered transformations alongside, or even instead of, traditional dress-up.

According to new data from across the YouCam apps, 26% of all digital looks applied by users in the YouCam Makeup app during Halloween week 2024 were Halloween-themed, showing how technology is rapidly becoming part of the seasonal ritual.

Social Sharing and Engagement Beyond the Try-On in YouCam Makeup

While Halloween accounted for 1 in 4 looks in the last week of October, amounting to over 170,000 Halloween-themed try-ons alone, engagement went beyond these quick experiments. Users saved nearly 13,000 of the Halloween transformations to their devices, representing strong social-sharing potential.

These behaviors underline how digital costumes are becoming shareable assets across social media, driving viral participation on TikTok, Instagram, and other platforms.

The Most Popular Halloween Effects across the YouCam Apps

YouCam’s internal analysis of 2024 Halloween week activity shows which “digital costumes” captured users’ imaginations across several of the YouCam apps:

• YouCam Makeup: Special effects (69,000 uses) like ghostly glows, cracked zombie skin, and vampire glam.
• YouCam Makeup: Custom backgrounds (53,000 uses) including haunted houses, eerie forests, and glowing pumpkin-scapes, with top templates exceeding 13,000 uses each.
• YouCam AI Pro: AI-powered style transfers that transformed selfies into horror-movie versions of vampires, witches, and zombies in seconds.
• YouCam Perfect: Editing effects and filters that added subtle enhancements for those who wanted a lighter touch.

Collectively, Halloween looks drove more than 176,000 try-ons in just one week, demonstrating that AR and AI are now core to seasonal self-expression.

Who’s Celebrating Digitally?

Demographic insights from U.S. app usage reveal that millennial women are leading the charge:

• 74% of Halloween users were female, compared to 26% male.
• The strongest age brackets were 25–34 (40%) and 35–44 (26%), with Gen Z and older groups participating at smaller but meaningful levels.

This profile suggests that digitally driven Halloween is most popular with the same consumer segment fueling growth in beauty and fashion tech overall: digitally savvy millennial women.

A Global Phenomenon

The rise of AI and AR use to celebrate Halloween isn’t confined to the U.S. In fact, some of the fastest adoption is happening abroad. In 2024, the YouCam apps saw exceptional YoY growth in Halloween usage in:

• Vietnam (+2,219%)
• France (+105%)
• The Netherlands (+57%)
• Germany (+54%)
• Brazil (+44%)

Meanwhile, active usage also grew in markets like Argentina (+10%) and Japan (+8%), suggesting emerging markets are fueling the next wave of digital Halloween celebrations.

AR and AI Are Mainstreaming Seasonal Rituals

Halloween serves as a microcosm of a much larger cultural shift: the integration of AR and AI into everyday self-expression. Generative AI adoption in consumer apps has exploded in recent years with the advent of Generative AI-enabled consumer apps. Apps like YouCam Video, YouCam AI Pro, and YouCam AI Chat bring image generation and video generation tools right to users’ fingertips, and seasonal activations like Halloween show how quickly these tools are moving from novelty to mainstream tradition.

Whether it’s a vampire filter shared on Instagram Stories, an AI-enhanced zombie selfie posted to TikTok, or a spooky background used in a virtual party invite, digital costumes are becoming a key part of how people connect, share, and celebrate.

"Halloween has always been about transformation, and AR and AI have unlocked an entirely new dimension of creativity," said Alice Chang, Founder and CEO of Perfect Corp. "These tools make participation more accessible, more shareable, and more global, showing how technology is changing not only the way we celebrate, but also how we connect through culture."

About Perfect Corp.

Perfect Corp. (NYSE: PERF) is a global leader in AI and AR technology, redefining creativity across beauty, fashion, skincare, and digital content creation. Its YouCam suite of apps has been downloaded over 1.1 billion times globally, empowering users to create, edit, and express themselves through photo, video, and generative AI tools. The YouCam platform also includes a powerful web-based editor and a suite of developer APIs, providing creators, brands, and technology partners with seamless access to content creation capabilities across platforms.

For brands and professionals, Perfect Corp. offers an award-winning portfolio of enterprise technologies, including virtual try-on experiences for makeup, hair, jewelry, watches, and fashion accessories, as well as AI-powered skin and hair analysis.

With a brand portfolio that includes YouCam and Skincare Pro, and a network of over 800 global brand partners, Perfect Corp. is transforming the beauty experience through personalized, immersive, and intelligent innovation.

For more information, visit perfectcorp.com and follow @Perfect-Corp.