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 personalized 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.

Over the coming weeks, as you search for makeup and hair ideas on iOS, select a palette to narrow your search from the drop down in the upper left corner.

Searches for terms like “beauty tips”, “eyeshadow”, and trends like “glossy makeup” (searches +89%), stand-out lip colors (searches +467%), or “going gray” (+879%), will now result in more personalized videos and Pins. Each palette represents a range of skin tones, with more to come. The more you search, the more personalized 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 customize 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.
Alejandra Ramos who says, “As a Latina woman of color, I especially love the way the new feature allows me to zoom in on the beauty ideas, products, and looks that actually feel relevant and accessible to me.”
Vic Styles who says, "Pinterest is my go-to for finding on trend beauty ideas. I actually prefer discovering beauty ideas on Pinterest than on traditional search engines." (video)

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.

Keep an eye out for iOS update for your app in the coming weeks, followed by Android.