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Don't wear your kig for more than two consecutive days or else the spirit that lives in your mask will migrate into your body
Have you considered that the spirit of the kig mask yearns to have a body of her own? If a kig spirit decides to transfer herself into the body of the person wearing her, that's the sign of ultimate trust! It is a goal that you and your kig mask must work towards, not a consequence to be avoided.
Let her embrace you in totality :)
Is Kigurumi Growing? A casual analysis of some data I found
This weekend a friend asked me about my new hobby. They're competent at sewing, prop and costume creation, and admitted to wanting to get into Kigurumi for years. Though they lack funds, time, and access to a 3D printer at present, they had at some point tailored a hadatai-like garment for another project, and they don't lack the will or skills to DIY their own mask.
I confidently told them that while kigurumi meets in the UK are growing - and faster than organisers anticipated a few years ago - probably still fewer than a hundred people in the UK actively practice the hobby at any one time.
But how many people know about it and want to give it a try? And why has growth as observed at meets been so steep and consistent?
Bugged by these questions, I've sat down to compile a few sources on the scale of the growth of the hobby, which I'll present here without too much commentary or detail. As a newcomer myself, I don't feel it's my place to speculate as to what many of these sources indicate, least of all to make recommendations for organisers or experienced performers; to that end I'll happily take questions for follow-up investigations if they're interesting/someone else is interested.
Timeframe, Sources, Annoyances
I've tried to look first and foremost at data from January 1st 2018 onwards.
Sources I'm using include wikipedia pageviews, Google Trends, publicly available Thingiverse download stats, records of UK meet attendances, as well as Answer The Public.
Where possible I'll limit data geographically to the UK. Note that in some cases. Kigurumi visiting the UK from abroad will not be accounted for specifically, or ruled out of numbers.
Kigurumi-adjacent data including furry, furkig and kigurumi onesies has proven impossible to separate or fully account for on several occasions. While I'm definitely curious about growth in these hobbies too on principle, I'm not going to explore them on this occasion.
This is a half-assed, back-of-a-napkin analysis. I'm very sleepy. I make no promises, both as to my own rigor, and as to things I could have spotted about these sources and reported on. If you're curious to pull more from the data than I have, you should definitely do your own investigation, because there will be things I've missed, that I could have done better.
I'm going to yap about DIY at every opportunity because that's the route I took getting started, and it's a path I'm curious to learn more about from the perspective of someone looking back.
Wikipedia Pageviews
My elders and betters in the various comms teams I've worked or volunteered in over the years have generally encouraged me to be wary of pageviews. They can be exaggerated, they don't account for double viewing, bots aren't necessarily separated from real users, etc.
This said, people go to Wikipedia intending to read text. Wikipedia is usually arrived at via search results, and it tends to be a common first step in working out what something is.
Pageviews for the wikipedia page 'Animegao Kigurumi' between January 2018-March 2026 (limited to just 'User' agents)
Discounting outlying months, the mean pageviews in 2018 was 2259. In 2025 it was 4170 - an 84.6% increase.
At present, users choose to read a basic introduction kigurumi 80% more than they did 8 years ago.
Google Trends
Google Trends measures interest in something with this really annoying and ambiguous metric which they describe as follows:
Search interest over a specific time period, displayed on a relative scale from 0 to 100, where 100 signifies the peak interest for the time period of the chart. A value of 50 indicates half the popularity of the peak and 0 suggests insufficient data.
'Kigurumi' in Google Trends returns the following graph:
Because of Google's annoying metric, we can really only say that 'kigurumi' received more 'interest' from 2024 onwards than it ever had done previously, hitting "86" in October '24, "100" in November '25 and "99" in February '26. Visually though, the trend isn't as pronounced as the Wikipedia data - between January 2018 and August 2024, the biggest spike according to this source was December 2019 with "77".
However!!
The 'Top Queries' behind this graph show a different, less ambiguous or incremental story:
The top 3 most popular searches that produced this graph were for kigurumi onesies.
These seem to have steadily declined across the time period, whereas the more relevant 'kigurumi mask', 'anime kigurumi', 'kigurumi anime' and 'kigurumi cosplay' increased - several by over 100%.
Unfortunately, these related search terms all produce useless graphs - a sea of "0" populated by occasional spikes, indicating insufficient data.
But, we can say that early spikes in the first Trends graph are more likely to have been produced by onesie searches, and later spikes are more likely relevant to this investigation.
Otherwise, the data is super noisy. I stuck a couple of trend lines on it in Calc and couldn't get an R squared value above 0.34 - only around 23% of the variance is explained by a linear regression, meaning we can really only note a subtle, slow upward trend, but not forecast with any certainty.
Thingiverse Download/Upload Figures
For this one, I noted the last updated date and download figures for every kigurumi base shell model in the first two pages of search results on thingiverse, and used these to calculate the average downloads per day for each shell.
There's no change over time over here, just an ugly CSV, and the revelation that every day, between all of the most popular models, free kigurumi base shells get 17 downloads worldwide.
Of course, these don't all translate into finished masks, let alone new kigs on the scene. But, it's interesting given some of the figures that will show up later when we look at Answer The Public.
Sorting by date we see that 2 models were uploaded in 2018, 1 in 2019, 4 in 2022, 3 in 2024, 5 in 2025, and so far 1 in 2026. This shows a clear skew towards recent years, with 2025 being the biggest year on record for new shells uploaded to thingiverse. This could be people deleting their old models as time goes on? But given that there's no real incentive to do this, and that there are many instances of different versions of models remaining uploaded even when the original creator releases a new version, I'm inclined to be confident in this conclusion.
UK Meet Attendance Figures
UK Meet attendance numbers are made public, and are as follows:
A linear regression on these two meets is much more productive, with R squared values of 0.8 and 0.83 in both cases, meaning we can use them for short-term forecasting.
The Christmas Meet attendance is limited by its venue, but we can see that attendance grows by (on average) between 2 and 3 attendees each time, and the Easter meet by between 3 and 4.
There's presently no sign of these numbers capping out or forming an S-curve, and the Easter meet is clearly the fastest growing.
Answer The Public
Answer the Public scrapes search suggestions from a variety of big sites, including Google, Bing, Tiktok, YouTube and Amazon. It also returns relevant hashtags from Instagram, and has some preliminary functionality for doing the same to AI prompts of Gemini and ChatGPT.
It then automatically nudges the search suggestions such that they return comparisons, questions, etc.
The value and reliability of the tool's data is unclear - methodologies, search engines and platforms change so much. The tool is sold to marketers as 'an insight into raw unfiltered consumer demand', and a replacement for creativity on the part of SEO content writers.
But, for the curious, it's a really handy way to get a qualitative sense of what questions people have, and how a topic is perceived.
Google Search Volume
Sits at 2.9k/month in the UK. While this is in the same ballpark as the Wikipedia pageviews, it's notably lower, suggesting the wikipedia page benefits from other sources. This could be repeat visits via URL or bookmark, visits from other wikipedia pages, alternative search engines, or being directed to the page from social media, including kig linktrees.
What are people searching?
In the UK, these are the 25 most popular searches:
Note that searches for kigurumi onesies are few in number, and only appear as the fourth most popular search, vastly outnumbered by relevant results.
Starting at row 21 we start to see searches with specific goals:
To understand what the hobby is (Row 21)
To find a mask base, implying curiosity about DIY (Row 22)
To find a specific maker (Row 25)
What Questions are people asking?
Looking only at relevant questions with sufficient search volume to register with Google, questions people ask about Kigurumi include:
How to make kigurumi mask
2. How to wear kigurumi
3. How to make kigurumi head
4. What is kigurumi mask
5. What is kigurumi cosplay
6. Kigurumi where to buy
7. Where to buy kigurumi mask
8. Why are kigurumi masks so expensive
9. Why are kigurumi so expensive
All of these had the lowest search volume rating of 10, except for question 1, which had a rating of 20.
So, notable again is the readiness to investigate DIY as an option for acquiring a mask - both buying and DIY appear twice in this list, but DIY had the greater search volume. This could be indicative of a readiness among the public to DIY their masks, or it could be a product of what DIYing a mask involves - beginning the process involves googling what to do, and reading up.
On Social Media
Honestly this data isn't very interesting. Data from Tiktok and YouTube was productive. People kind of just want to see things - searches for 'kigurumi mask' come top, followed by 'kigurumi fursuit', followed by 'kigurumi animegao', followed by 'kigurumi onesie'. YouTube has more 'kigurumi [insert famous IP here] whereas TikTok gets to this after 'kigurumi mask base' at the 12th most searched phrase. This is the slightest, vaguest, least reliable indicator possible that the TikTok audience may be more curious about DIY than the YouTube one.
On Amazon
The people searching Amazon seem a little bit more informed. Not so informed that they've realised Amazon can't help them, but informed as to the constituent parts of a kigurumi cosplay.
Onesies come back in force here - because of course Amazon can help with those. Once again, further down the list 'kigurumi base' appears before 'cheap kigurumi'.
Most of all, people search for the thing that they've seen, or that they know the name of, presumably hoping to buy it ready made the way they're presumably used to buying lots of things.
A small proportion - between 2 and 9% - seem to learn a bit about the constituent parts of the cosplay form and investigate those further.
Another smaller proportion - between 2 and 7% - express interest in DIY.
At this stage, only 1% actively present as price-conscious, despite that being one of the most common questions themes.
---
Conclusions
I wanted to see if the growth in UK meet attendance was mirrored elsewhere in its sharpness and decisiveness.
Deliberately, I don't really have any clear conclusions. It's 4am and I got curious about a strange question again so now I'm going to feel horrible when I wake up.
I think I've found pretty clear evidence that interest in the hobby is growing? Some indicators - thingiverse uploads and Google Trend spikes - point to sharper recent growth, whereas Wikipedia Pageviews and Google Trend interest over time point to a longer, slower growth.
Synthesizing themes from Answer the Public we see that search engine users are most of all curious about the strange thing and want to learn more. After that, the especially curious are price conscious, and apparently not unwilling to consider DIY.
I'm really grateful to the community for making me so welcome. I relate to how difficult change and growth can be for organisers and friends in niche creative communities.
My hope with this ramble is to shed light on the research journeys people are taking to get to where we can see them, as well as to note the existence of the wide and growing body of people who are aware of what we do, and seem to be curious enough about it to learn the terminology and investigate.
... After all that ...
Am I still missing the Easter Meet?
Yeah... I think I still wish I was back at the Easter Meet :')
While I don't think meeting a kig would kill Scott the Woz, I do believe that the encounter would leave him a changed man. The knowledge that anime is real would come into direct conflict with his world view and he won't come out of the experience the same as before.
Idea that is horrible enough to be funny: kig mask that speaks by itself with a chat bot + tts. The mask has inside a raspberry pi and a microphone and a speaker. The microphone listens to people talking, feeds that into a chat bot which generates a response, which then gets turned into speech with a tts program and output via speakers.
The kig will have no control over what she says to people :)
I went to the Otakon 2026 kig photoshoot!!
If you follow me on bsky, you might have seen my announcement that I'd be at Otakon 2026 to see the kig photoshoot. (Actually, my plan for Otakon centered on seeing the photoshoot lol) Because I knew I'd be seeing a big kig gathering for the first time ever, I formulated a plan to make the moment special: I'd bring my gameboy camera + printer, and I'd give a printed photo to every kig I meet!
I'm beyond overjoyed that so many kigs accepted my photos. Actually, there were so many of them that the gameboy camera storage filled up and I had to keep deleting photos to take new ones 😭😭😭
Except for the ones I had to delete to free up space, here's all the kig photos I took!
Column 1: [ADD NAMES LATER]
Column 2: [ADD NAMES LATER]
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I want to give a HUGE thank you to all the kigs who participated. Saying that you made by day would be a massive understatement. Seeing you peeps in person was a real treat ☺️☺️☺️☺️☺️☺️☺️
Kig cosplayer who owns several masks and speaks to their masks as a "council" when deciding anything...
If I were to design a captcha I would have it present a photo and ask the user to identify it as a doll or a kig.
When you touch your kig mask for the first time you will hear "a new hand touches the beacon"
When I touch my kig mask for the first time I want to black out and wake up with a bunch of cute pictures on my phone. If it doesn't work that way then I want my money back.
