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Pinterest Provides Cultural Context on Halloween Costumes, Shares Data on Halloween Search Trends
With searches for Halloween ideas ramping up on Pinterest, the platform has added some new informational prompts within Halloween-related searches which highlight the cultural significance of certain costumes, in order to help users avoid misusing common themes and ideas.
As explained by Pinterest:
“Costumes are consistently a top-searched term, but many people may not know that certain costumes are appropriations of other cultures. As a platform for positivity, we want to make it easy to find culturally-appropriate Halloween ideas, and bring awareness to the fact that costumes should not be opportunities to turn a person’s identity into a stereotyped image.”
As you can see in the first example above, a search for ‘Day of the Dead costumes’, for example, will bring up a new ‘Cultural appropriation on Halloween’ informational Pin, which provides further background data on the event, and its significance, which will help improve understanding among Pinners.
Pinterest will also limit recommendations for costumes that appropriate cultures.
It’s the latest in Pinterest’s evolving efforts to improve representation and diversity in all aspects of its company – both internally and externally. Pinterest also recently expanded its skin tone search qualifiers, helping to better personalize its search options for more users, while it’s also undergoing a review of its internal workplace culture in order to address concerns with racial inequality.
And in addition to these new informational prompts, Pinterest has also provided some new insights on trending Halloween searches in 2020, which will see a different approach to the event than most are used to.
According to Pinterest, searches for the following terms are on the rise this year:
- Halloween breakfast
- Haunted garage
- Halloween piñata
- Halloween scavenger hunt
- Halloween games
- Haunted mansion bathroom
- Halloween themed bedroom
- Backyard Halloween party
Most of those are probably as expected, but they might provide some additional pointers for your approach to the event, or get you thinking about related tie-ins for your campaigns.
You can read more on Pinterest’s Halloween usage stats and new tools here.