Ever scoured the web to find the perfect red lipstick, highlighter or foundation to suit your skin tone but failed terribly? 

We feel you.

But in a bid to become more inclusive, image-saving hub Pinterest have now made the process much easier thanks to the introduction of a very clever new tool.

With 200 billion people using the platform – a whopping 70% for hair and beauty purposes - Pinterest-obsessives can now whittle down results that relate to their skin colour, as opposed to having to wade through countless images to work out whether a particular product or shade will suit them or not.

And options for different skin tones aren’t clumsily lumped into a few broad categories either. 

Pinterest have enlisted beauty visual platform Modiface, who created special algorithms for skin tone detection, taking into account shadows and poor lighting.

Intelligently, it’s designed to factor in different levels of haemoglobin, which directly impacts how light or dark your skin is, and identified 16 shades, grouped into four colour palettes - with plans to expand the range further.

Simply choose your skin tone and search for a product as normal and Pinterest will display a ream of results – but click on the one you’re interested in and it will filter them to suit your colouring. It’s as easy as that. It certainly saves you having to schlep to a beauty counter IRL to find out whether a product is worth parting with your hard-earned cash.

We’re saluting Pinterest for this diversity-aware step forward– here’s hoping other platforms and brands follow suit.

You can learn more about how this new technology works by reading the Pinterest Engineering blog post. 

Main Image: Unsplash