Forgot About Pinterest? It's Surprisingly Good for These 5 Things

I recently picked up my Pinterest boards after years of neglect when I started making art again. It turns out, Pinterest is an amazing place to explore art, save images and videos that inspire you, and refer back to those images when you need them. And I'm not the only one on this sometimes-forgotten social media site—the company's stock price jumped in May as more Gen Z women flock to it.

Aside from using it to pin artwork that inspires my creative side, Pinterest is also my absolute favorite place to save pictures of haircuts so that when I go to a salon, I'm not scrambling to find an image of the cut I want. If you're doing any of these things listed below, I highly encourage you to explore Pinterest as a tool for brainstorming, exploring, and organizing ideas.

1. Wedding or Big Party Planning

If you're planning a wedding or some other kind of big party, you have to make dozens of decisions about things you may have never thought about before. What style of chairs do you want at the reception? What color should the tablecloths be? Do you want a wedding cake with fresh flowers as a topper?

Go to Pinterest and start exploring weddings as a topic. The app will suggest subcategories and show you relevant images and short videos. Save the ones that resonate with you and organize them onto boards. You might have boards for Wedding Ceremony, Wedding Invitations, Dresses, Food and Drinks, Flowers, Decorations, and so on. By saving pictures of weddings that resemble the one you want to have, you can start to figure out your style and the specifics of what you want.

2. Home Renovations and Remodels

Home renovations are another area where people are forced to make decisions about things they never thought about much before. I remodeled a kitchen many years ago, and I had no idea that I would have to decide on the color of the grout for the backsplash and what type of knobs we'd put on the cabinet doors ("Can I say none?" I asked my contractor; "Sure," he said, "we can do finger notches"). I used Pinterest a lot while working on the plans for the new kitchen because looking at pictures of things I liked was a lot easier than trying to make up my mind about what I liked without having any visual references. What type of lighting do I want? I don't know. Let me refer to the pictures of kitchens I liked and see what type of lighting they used.

Pinterest works equally well for planning changes to the outside of your home, like sprucing up a garden or yard.

3. Refining Your Fashion and Style (Including Haircuts and Tattoos)

It's fairly customary now to arrive at a salon and immediately pull out your phone to show your stylist what kind of haircut or color you want. Rather than taking screenshots or downloading pictures from the web, save images you find on Pinterest. That way, you can refer to them easily any time, even years from now, without taking up any extra space on your phone.

It works the same for other types of personal style and fashion—clothing, accessories, tattoos, etc.

Another reason Pinterest is helpful in this case is that as you start to save images that inspire you, the app shows you more similar or related images. That way, you explore new looks you might not have thought of on your own and maybe even expand your boundaries.

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4. Exploring Recipes

Some people are more inclined to cook if they see pictures of the dishes they want to make rather than reading a list of ingredients. Those people should pin recipes on Pinterest.

A friend of mine has hundreds of recipes saved that she scrolls through when planning meals. Many of those pins have gorgeous food photos and recipes that came from another Pinterest user or someone's food blog. But my friend also snaps photos of recipes in books and magazines and uploads those images to her Pinterest board so she can find them as well. She also has a board for cocktail ideas.

5. Arts and Crafts

Whatever art or craft you make, you can use Pinterest to save images and videos that inspire you, teach you, or even have examples of what supplies to buy. When a Pinterest pin comes from a product page, Pinterest automatically duplicates the pin to a board it keeps for you called Your Shopping List. So if you find art supplies or even pieces of art you want to buy, you can sometimes go straight to the seller online and purchase the item.

Pin Your Interests

If you never knew how useful Pinterest can be, consider how it could make your life simpler by helping you organize visual ideas. And if it's been a while since you tried the app, give it another spin. It has much better tools for arranging the pins on your boards and editing them than it did in its early days.