Pinterest Will Now Allow Users to Search Hairstyles by Texture

Search engines are the primary way internet users find the content they’re looking for—but biases built into algorithms mean it’s sometimes hard, even impossible, to find beauty results that don’t center Caucasian faces and features. That’s why Pinterest is rolling out a first-of-its-kind tool to let Pinners find hairstyles that match the texture they have.

“Created with Black, Brown, and Latinx Pinners in mind,” the new feature “enables Pinners to refine hair searches by six different hair patterns: protective, coily, curly, wavy, straight and shaved/bald,” per a press release from the company. The company estimates that 500 million Pinterest images have already been tagged with a hair pattern, so get to searching already.

Pinterest has been offering a skin-tone-range search feature since 2018, another industry first in the continuing effort to better cater to users, and especially women, of all ethnicities.

“As they say, ‘Necessity is the mother of invention,’” Naeemah LaFond, editorial hairstylist and global artistic director of Amika, who was instrumental in developing the new feature, told Glamour in a statement. “The concept of Pinterest’s hair pattern search spoke to me because the absence of it has been something that I and other women, in particular Black and Brown women, have felt othered by for quite some time. Non-Black faces and representation is usually the default on most search engines when it comes to beauty. The new tools that Pinterest has implemented have set a new and more inclusive standard and I’m proud to have played a part in that.” 

She continued, “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.”