Pinterest Launches AI Beauty Guides. Here’s What It Means for Black Beauty Founders
Pinterest’s new AI tool and first Beauty Trend Report turn beauty inspiration into action, and the founders who show up now will be the ones she finds.
By Black Beauty Founders Staff
Pinterest has launched Beauty Guides, an AI-powered feature that turns hair and nail Pins into personalized, step-by-step guides, alongside its first standalone Beauty Trend Report, created with Sephora. Here is what the launch means for Black beauty founders and the customers they serve.
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What Beauty Guides Does
Beauty Guides, announced October 6, reads the look inside a Pin. Pinterest’s visual technology picks out the hairstyle, color, nail shape and finish, and a large language model turns those details into a personal guide: what to ask for at the salon, what to expect during the appointment, similar looks to explore, relevant products and step-by-step instructions for recreating it at home.
Users tap “Get the Guide” on a hair or nail Pin to open theirs. The feature is live for iOS users in the U.S., with more regions and product categories planned.
Matt Madrigal, Pinterest’s Chief Product and Technology Officer, said people come to Pinterest “with a point of view,” even before they have the words to describe it. Beauty Guides gives them the words.
What the First Beauty Trend Report Found
The report’s central finding will sound familiar to every woman who has ever adapted a trend to fit her texture, tone and lifestyle: shoppers are personalizing trends rather than copying them. Searches are getting more specific, with looks like textured French bobs and mocha balayage on the rise, and searches for dusty rose blush up 189% year over year.
Pinterest’s own research shows why beauty brands are paying attention. More than 85% of Pinterest users say they discover new beauty trends there before anywhere else. Users are 79% more likely than the competitive average to say Pinterest’s beauty content feels extremely relevant to them, including ideas that reflect their own skin tone and hair type. And nearly nine in 10 say they feel confident buying beauty products they discover on the platform.
The Trends Black Beauty Founders Should Watch
Several of the report’s fastest-rising searches speak directly to textured hair and protective styles. Searches for curly butterfly cuts rose 464%, French curl braids rose 210%, black and pink knotless braids rose 87% and pink wig hairstyles rose 84%. Rosemary water for hair climbed 269%, and curly hair routines for wavy hair grew 203%.
The bob is changing too. Pinterest found textured French bobs up 338% and long layered bobs up 622%, as people look for shaped cuts that move with their natural texture.
Body and scalp care are getting the same attention as the face. Searches for body wash for glowing skin rose 206%, body care routine aesthetic rose 202% and retinol body lotion rose 144%, with scalp detox and scalp treatment searches climbing too. For body care founders, the full post-shower routine is the opportunity.
Fragrance is moving just as fast. Searches for skin scent rose 287% and marshmallow perfume rose 248%, a cozy, close-to-skin scent wave that fragrance founders can build around this season.
Building on Pinterest’s Inclusive Beauty Tools
Beauty Guides builds on inclusive search tools Pinterest has introduced over the years. In 2018, it launched skin tone ranges, letting users narrow beauty searches by skin tone. In 2021, it added hair pattern search, created with Black, Brown and Latinx Pinners in mind, so users can filter hair ideas by six patterns: protective, coily, curly, wavy, straight and shaved or bald.
Those tools made beauty discovery more personal for Black women searching for looks that match their texture and tone. Beauty Guides adds the next step: helping her turn that look into a plan.
Why This Is a Founder Moment
Pinterest is where she plans her next look, which makes it where she decides what to buy. When a tool can read a protective style or a nail finish and point her toward the products that bring it to life, brands built for her texture and her tone become the natural answer. The question is whether those brands are there when she looks.
For the more than 3,000 founders across the Black Beauty Founders ecosystem, the opportunity is to make your brand easy for both Pinterest and your customer to understand. Here is our take on where to start.
Show the finished look clearly. Beauty Guides reads what is in the image: the style, the color, the shape, the finish. Close, well-lit photos of the result on real texture and real skin tones give the technology, and your customer, something to read. Lifestyle shots that hide the hair or the nails give it less to work with.
Use the words she would search. The guides translate a photo into salon language, like knotless braids or almond nails. Put those same specific terms in your Pin titles, descriptions and board names. The trend report shows how precise people are searching: not just braids, but French curl braids.
Make your products findable. Pinterest has not said exactly how Beauty Guides chooses the products it suggests. What founders can control are the basics: a Pinterest business account, a claimed website and an uploaded product catalog, so your products can appear as shoppable Pins across the platform.
Treat the trend report as free market research. If you sell a rosemary hair oil, a body wash or a body mist, the searches above tell you which looks and language to build content around this season.
Play the long game. A feed post can disappear in a day, but a strong Pin can keep driving discovery for months. Treat every Pin as a long-term asset.
Pinterest is making it easier for women to turn the looks they love into a plan. The founders who show up clearly, with Pins that speak her language, will be the ones she finds. Black Beauty Founders will keep covering how founders can build for discovery on Pinterest in the months ahead.
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