If you are one of the millions of people who turn to Pinterest to get the latest beauty, style, and hair ideas you’ll be happy to know they just made the search process much easier and more inclusive to people of color and their specific hair needs. Pinterest has been working on creating custom searches for people of color now for a few years, in 2018 they added an AR Try-On feature that filtered makeup searches by skin tone, product types, and shades. Now, they are unveiling the first-of-its-kind technology with Black, Brown, and Latinx Pinners in mind that empowers users to search for hair inspiration across hair types and textures.
In this past month alone, over 120 million searches for hair and over 5 billion Pins were created that related to hair. Among these top 500 trends, 17% of hairstyle trends contain hair pattern keywords, including “Coi Leray braids”, “summer box braids” and “afro kinky hairstyles braids”. Pinners will now be able to narrow down their search for hairstyles, haircuts, and hair color by their specific hair type So if you’re looking for the latest cut but need to see options for your hair type, simply click the filter that best matches your hair texture to see pins that work for you. In a press release, Pinterest stated that the Hair Pattern function was designed with Black, Brown, and Latin X users whose natural hair textures are systematically shunned or ignored. Developed by the company’s inclusive product team what the help of Hairstylist Naeemah LaFond. “This new tool will mark a much-needed milestone for racial equality in the world of coding,” LaFond says. “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 adds. Pinners can try this new feature now just in time for those fall hair inspirations.
