Black Pinterest users were elated in 2018 when the app first introduced its search tool to filter out results for brown and dark skinned tones. Pinterest has announced that it’s continuing to make strides toward catering to its Black, brown, and Latinx demographic with its new feature — a search tool to filter out hair textures.
“Today we’re introducing our latest advancement in inclusive beauty hair pattern search – a first-of-its-kind technology, that empowers users to search for hair inspiration across hair of all types ranging from protective, to wavy, to bald,” said Pinterest in its announcement.
Try it now and #SeeYourself here: https://t.co/dFkklsWLKv pic.twitter.com/Zgi5Iiszjz
— Pinterest Business (@pinterestbiz) August 18, 2021
While cognizant of the importance of diverse hair representation, Pinterest’s hair pattern options will not only scale from coily, curly, wavy, and straight textures, but also will help one search for protective styles. Plus, those who are bald aren’t left out of the conversation either. The tool’s awareness of detail to various hair textures is all thanks to computer vision-powered object detection.
“Our mission on the Inclusive Product team is to help everyone feel like Pinterest is a place for them,” said Annie Ta, Head of Inclusive Product at Pinterest. “As a visual discovery platform, we have an opportunity and responsibility to do a better job of increasing representation in the products we build.”
Majority of Black and brown women are always consistently on the hunt for their next hairstyle and this feature will now be useful for sparking inspiration for one’s “Next hairstyle” mood board to find the perfect match.
“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,” said Naeemah LaFond, Editorial Hairstylist and Global Artistic Director of Amika, who was on board for building and designing the tool.
From back when the app first started exploring ways to improve its inclusivity, Pinterest engineers have now made improvements to the increase of refined search results and especially to the algorithm of Pinterest account feeds. Its current algorithm has “detected hair patterns in over 500 million images”.
Pinterest shared that the hair pattern search is available in the U.S., U.K., Ireland, Canada, Australia and New Zealand on iOS and Android. International users will get to join in on getting their hands on the tool in the next upcoming months. The new feature can be tested out here.