Pinterest brings inclusivity to your hairstyle searches
Posted on August 27, 2021 | by Aqleema Anwar
Inclusivity was the primary goal in 2019 when Pinterest launched its industry-leading product that features searchable skin tones; allowing users (over 200 million of them at the time) to narrow beauty results by skin tone range. The company also recently announced an expansion of this feature to more countries.
In August 2021, leveraged off that same first-of-its-kind technology and an even more enhanced approach to inclusive beauty, Pinterest introduced a hair pattern search. This search option was created specifically with Black, Brown, and LatinX consumers in mind and allows Pinners to choose between six different patterns: protective, coily, curly, wavy, straight, and shaved or bald. These were patterns that were detected the most in over 500 million pins about hair.
Annie Ta, Head of Inclusive Product points out the importance of her team’s mission; to make sure everyone feels like Pinterest is a place for them.
She goes on to say;
“As a visual discovery platform, we have an opportunity and responsibility to do a better job of increasing representation in the products we build. That’s why we build hair pattern search using computer vision technology to help identify hair pattern in images.”
I decided to give it a try.
I have a friend’s wedding coming up in a little over a month, so I decided to get some inspiration for my short wavy South Asian hair.
I typed “hairstyles” in the search bar, and I was immediately presented with this; an introduction to the new feature.
image: Pinterest
Selecting Wavy from the options gave me a brief description confirming that my hair does in fact fall into this category.
The results definitely came back based on wavy hair; however, they also included hair lengths that didn’t match mine. So, I decided to narrow down the results even more, starting with “short wavy hairstyles”.
I noticed the hair pattern options along the top of the page disappeared, but my results still came up with what I had searched for. I tried again, this time opting for “coily hairstyles” to test it out on a different hair type.
Search results were satisfactory but again, no pattern options along the top.
In a statement released by Pinterest in mid-August, this is exactly what should be happening when you use specific or exact searches. The search results will give you exactly what you are looking for. By doing a broader search such as “wedding hairstyles” or “long hair” and then letting the technology narrow down the options even further is how this feature was designed to work.
For those wondering, I was able to find exactly what I wanted by searching “short hair” and then selecting “wavy”.
The best part is that much like the option to isolate a skin tone range, hair patterns is an “added feature”, an opportunity available for a user who is logged into the platform to elevate their own personal experience.
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