Introducing More Inclusive Beauty Searches

With billions of beauty Pins saved to Pinterest, and with “beauty” as one of the most searched categories, we want to make it easy for everyone to find the most relevant hair and makeup Pins for their skin tone, style and life. Women all over the world use Pinterest as a visual discovery engine to get beauty inspiration, from an everyday look to a special occasion. In fact, women on Pinterest are 2.4x more likely to experiment with different makeup, compared to women on other platforms.

In April we began testing an inclusive search feature on the web to narrow beauty results by skin tone range. Today we’re announcing skin tone ranges is launching more broadly (across millions of searches) and coming to mobile, so you can discover personalised makeup and hair ideas on the go, whether you’re out shopping for new products, trying new tutorials at your bathroom mirror, or pulling up some inspiration at your salon.

Searches for terms like “beauty tips”, “eyeshadow”, and trends like “glossy makeup” (searches +89%), stand-out lip colours (searches +467%), or “going gray” (+879%), will now result in more personalised videos and Pins. Each palette represents a range of skin tones, with more to come. The more you search, the more personalised your home feed and recommendations will become.

Last year, nearly 60% of the top 100 search terms for skin-related searches involved a tone, such as dark skin, pale skin, and olive skin, which showed us women of all skin types wanted a way to customise their searches.

This feature is a result of our technical and Inclusion & Diversity teams working closely together. As we recently shared in our annual diversity report, we’re committed to growing an employee base that understands and reflects the world we want to serve.

Pinners shouldn’t have to do extra work like add keywords to find personally relevant ideas. And so the teams got together, listened to Pinner feedback, and worked on improving our machine learning technologies for more diverse results, which continues to evolve. Increasing engagement with beauty Pins is just a start in making all results more representative of a range of looks and styles.

We also continue to listen to Pinner feedback. We hear from Pinners like Priyanka who use Pinterest to find traditional Indian beauty, fashion and style ideas. And Alejandra Ramos who as a Latina woman finds beauty ideas and products that look and feel relevant and accessible, and Vic Styles who enjoys discovering beautifully curated content on Pinterest with the click of a button. We talk about these Pinner needs and feedback constantly and hold ourselves accountable to not only build an inclusive company that is welcoming of everyone, but an inclusive product that is useful to all.