Natural Beauty Trends on Pinterest

With over 400 million monthly active users, Pinterest is an important visual search engine and a prime platform on which to discover the latest beauty trends. With user-generated content from both individuals and brands (big and small) who may be pinning between 5 and 25 new ‘Pins’ each day, there are millions of searchable entries on Pinterest. As beauty is a visual industry, you can see easily why Pinterest is the place to define the latest trends.

It is certainly eye candy to enjoy browsing in idle hours or late night on your cellphone screen. But, for indie beauty, it is far more than that. First, let’s look at why Pinterest is so good at predicting and pointing to beauty trends before we discuss Pinterest as a marketing tool for indie beauty brands.

Pinterest Natural Beauty Trends in 2021

Pinterest itself helpfully comes out with its own annual Pinterest Predicts report which covers a whole range of sector trends from beauty to DIY, crafting, travel, health, fitness and more. Pinterest makes an interesting point about its platform predicting future trends not just stating current ones. They describe their report as ‘a not-yet-trending report’ and “a window into the future from a platform where people go to plan theirs”. In fact, Pinterest says that eight out of 10 of its 2020 trend predictions came true.

The 2021 report has a brief overview of beauty trends ranging from the newly-coined term skinimalism, which is described as a less caked-on make-up look and more about letting skin glow naturally, to indie beauty’s cute trend of emoji-inspired nail art.

The report makes it predictions based on the rise of search terms; for instance in 2020, we find ‘homemade skin care’ up 110 per cent and ‘natural everyday make-up’ up 180 per cent over the year. The search phase ‘how to get naturally glowing skin’ quadrupled in the past year with the UK, Australia and Canada the countries where most searches for that term originated.

Skinamalism

Skinamalism is a word Pinterest has coined to describe our yearning for pared down beauty. In the coming year, Pinterest predicts consumers wanting simple products for minimalist routines using only the essentials. That skincare is the leading beauty segment according to Pinterest is not surprising. The pandemic has seen mainstream make-up less important as we stay home more and perhaps even use apps to apply make-up when we are visible online. Within our homes, we are looking more to self care and are taking time to enjoy slow beauty and to enhance a healthy, natural look.

Pinterest’s report says it’s time to say goodbye to the 12-step beauty routine. It recommends skincare brands help their pinner audience to “…streamline their regimens and discover clean products with natural ingredients”. Meanwhile, it adds that makeup brands should be sharing tips on how to create a “dewy, natural beauty look that will look great on camera and video calls”. As you can see, our increased hours in front of screens during the pandemic have influenced beauty consumers’ purchasing habits and sense of what beauty regimes require when we are connecting mostly on apps.

Trending Skincare Ingredients

Interestingly, Pinterest singles out some ingredients as key trends. ‘Aloe vera face mask’ was up 115 per cent in Pinterest search with France, the UK and Indonesia the top countries searching that term. That the product searched was a face mask is indicative too of our current yearning for glowing skin as the foundation of natural beauty.

Wellness

If you look at beauty-related themes in the Pinterest Predict’s report, such as wellness, you find trending searches for sleep routines, face yoga, and our bedrooms and bathrooms as self-care sanctuaries. These areas might spark your ideas for creating natural wellness skincare products.

Searching Natural Beauty Trends on Pinterest

Why is Pinterest so useful for discovering what is trending in natural beauty or whatever your niche of beauty is? It rewards fresh, new, attractive content. In 2020, Pinterest made some significant changes to its algorithm, as many social media platforms like Instagram do from time to time, and often to their users’ annoyance.

It declared that recycled pins were less important and urged pinners to create new pins even if for old content on their blog. It wants to increase engagement from its users and of course, sees new content as alluring. Before, bloggers were often using third-party apps to interface with their Pinterest account and shuffle their old Pins up to the top of their themed boards – in effect republishing the same content with no effort or time involved.

Now, when you hit search on a term and start browsing down the pins you will be seeing more of the very latest content, not old content resurfacing.

If you sign up to Pinterest, you can opt in to receive emails with latest relevant pins to add to your boards. Pinterest bases its choices on your pinning history so you receive ones in your niche.

Another way to use Pinterest to find out how popular certain beauty trends are is to use its search. This sounds obvious but there are some tips we can give to help you discover more than the pins as search results.

Before you hit enter on your search word or term, pause to look at the related suggestions Pinterest offers up just below the search field. If you type ‘natural skin care’ for example, Pinterest is likely to come up with options such as:

• natural skin care routine
• natural skin care products
• natural skin care routine for teens
• natural skin care products diy
• natural skin care for oily skin
• natural skin care routine diy
• natural skin care ingredients
• natural skincare packaging
• natural skincare aesthetics

Pinterest also has a dedicated Pinterest trends search page which helps find out whether a term is trending in three countries: the US, the US and Canada. It gives graphs showing the volume of search for that term over the past year. Scroll down the same page to find top trends of the week.

We suggest keeping a close eye on Pinterest for these natural, sustainable beauty trends that are predicted to rise further in 2021:

• zero waste
• refillable beauty
• essential beauty
• sustainable beauty products / brands
• minimal beauty routines
• plastic-free cosmetic packaging
• waterless beauty
• Circular beauty
• face masks
• all-inclusive beauty
• naked beauty
• solid beauty products
• conscious consumerism

Marketing your Indie Beauty Brand on Pinterest

Often incorrectly bundled with social media, Pinterest is definitely a visual search platform that indie beauty entrepreneurs and brands should be on and certainly checking for inspiration, trends, competitors, partners, branding, design and a whole lot more. The advantage of Pinterest for the time poor is that it is far less social than Instagram, Facebook and Twitter. Few users bother to comment on Pins, preferring instead to repin them in on their themed boards for reference later.

You can design a Pinnable image to embed in a blog post or to represent a product or page on your website, then post it up on one of your own boards on your Pinterest account and pretty much forget about it. Meanwhile, if you’ve applied some tricks and tips like creating an engaging image, caption and pin description and adding some relevant keywords to aid search, your pin can get noticed, ‘repinned’ and gain you Pinterest traffic to your own website – or to wherever you’ve linked it.

As with social media like Instagram, Pinterest delivers the best results if you are a consistent, active ‘pinner’. But, unlike Instagram which gives you a single link in your bio, each Pin can have its own link and you also get your bio link on your account page. The more pins you post up, the more search-friendly links track back to your website. That is why Pinterest is a search engine of serious interest to beauty brands.

We cover how to master Pinterest for your beauty brand in one of our mini-labs on The Lab at Formula Botanica, our membership site (see below for how to join).

Why not try out Pinterest to help your passion for natural beauty or beauty brand grow? Let us know in the comments below if you come across some interesting natural beauty trends on Pinterest and if you think their predictions on Skinimalism were right.

The Lab at Formula Botanica

The Lab at Formula Botanica is an online members’ hub, where you’ll connect with the best in the industry, and learn from the Formula Botanica team as well as our regular special guest speakers. Once you become a Lab member, our monthly mini courses help you embrace your passion for formulation, plants and indie beauty business. Sign up to find out when the Lab next opens its doors to members by pre-registering here.

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Liz Ayling

Liz was Formula Botanica’s Content Coordinator between August 2020-2024. Liz worked as a professional blogger, journalist and site developer for many years and was also part of the Formula Botanica student community. Read more about the Formula Botanica Team.