Pinterest is on a mission to diversify its platform and, if yesterday’s new feature is any indication, they’re doing an awesome job.
According to Wired, the company realized it was taking “specific keywords to find hair, makeup, or fashion ideas showing women who weren’t white” and “in some cases, the level of specification meant a person couldn’t find what they were searching for at all.”
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“We were thinking, how we can look at our database of pins and make sure we were in some way matching and labeling content across different groups of people?” Candice Morgan, head of inclusion and diversity, told Wired.
The answer: Users can now find beauty ideas and products for different skin tones via an inclusive search feature.
“We’ve heard from Pinners that it’s not always easy to find the most relevant ideas among the 8 billion beauty and hair Pins on our site,” the brand said in a release. “That’s why we’re rolling out a way to customize your beauty search results by a skin tone range. As you search for makeup tutorials, hairstyles and more, you can select from four palettes to narrow your search. Each palette represents a range of skin tones.”
According to the company, beauty is—not surprisingly—one of the most searched categories, and most people use the platform to look for simple ideas they can try in their daily life. “Now, as you search on Pinterest for lipstick, eye shadow and other beauty ideas, palettes will appear below the search bar. Just give a palette a tap to narrow down results by a skin tone range. This helps surface more relevant Pins, so you can see how a color or shade might look on a skin tone. It’s also helpful for hairstylists or makeup artists with a range of clients,” Omar Seyal, head of discovery product at Pinterest, told us.
Update: As a very “shoppable” and global extension to what the brand rolled out in 2018, Pinterest has announced in a statement that they’ll be making “updates to skin tone ranges and the addition of new brands to virtually shop and try on lipsticks through AR Try on. These updates increase the discoverability of beauty products and tutorials personalized to individual skin tone, style, and preference.”
“Skin tone ranges (our inclusive beauty results search feature) is now available beyond the U.S.—in the UK, Canada, Ireland, Australia, and New Zealand—and the design has been refreshed to surface options right from search results. The quality of the technology has also improved, and the number of beauty and fashion Pins where a skin tone can be identified has quadrupled. Our skin tone signal is now 3X as likely to detect multiple skin tone ranges in top search results, compared to previous technology,” the brand said.
