Pinterest has always been the go-to source for beauty inspiration—especially for hair and makeup. We don’t know about you, but we can spend hours on the social media platform scrolling through millions of images to find inspiration for our next salon appointment. Yes sis, we stay pinning our favorite looks!
While the platform has grown to become one of our favorite sources of inspiration, we will admit that there are times when finding women that look like us can be like finding a needle in the haystack. Luckily for us, Pinterest has just launched an option to search for looks according to hair pattern, and it’s a game-changer.
“Our mission is to help everyone feel like Pinterest is a place for them,” says Pinterest’s Head of Inclusive Product Annie Ta. “As a visual discovery platform, we have an opportunity and responsibility to do a better job of increasing representation in the products we build. By doing this, we hope we’re able to use technology for good and make it easier for people to find hair inspiration for them on Pinterest.”
Below, learn more about the beauty tool of our dreams.
How The Pinterest Hair Pattern Search Works
The hair pattern search—created with Black, Brown, and Latinx Pinners in mind—features pivotal technology that enables users to refine hair searches by six different hair patterns: protective, coily, curly, wavy, straight, and shaved/bald.
Over the coming weeks, you can easily search through 500 million images for a broad hair term, like summer hairstyles or short hair, and narrow the results to your desired style and preference.
“I think that Black and Brown Pinners and creators will feel more seen and included with this new feature,” LaFond adds. “This new tool will mark a much-needed milestone for racial equity in the world of coding. I’m sure that in the coming years we will find ways to even further improve the process, but I’m excited that with Pinterest we’ve taken one huge step forward.”
This new inclusive technology builds on Pinterest’s industry-first feature skin tone ranges that launched in 2018.
While advising Pinterest on the overall user experience and language, Editorial Hairstylist and Global Artistic Director of Amika, Naeemah LaFond says the concept of the hair pattern search really spoke to her. “Just the simple idea that I don’t have to work twice as hard to find a hairstyle because of my hair type is a game-changer,” she tells us.
Hair pattern search is available in the US, UK, Ireland, Canada, Australia, and New Zealand on iOS and Android.
