Pinterest: A Love/Hate Story

Did you guys hear the big news this week? Pinterest hit 10 million U.S. monthly unique visitors in nine months. Which makes it the fastest growing standalone website. Ever.

For the unfamiliar, Pinterest is an image sharing website where you can save images from anywhere all in once place, and can organize your pictures (or “pins”) on different boards. When I first signed up for the site last March (or rather, when they deigned to accept my request to join), Pinterest had a decidedly design-heavy slant. For instance, I used it to keep track of images of different types of wallpaper that I would one day like to use in my powder room. (Reality, and the fact that I am 5 to 10 years from living in a place with a powder room that I am allowed to wallpaper, is not really an issue at play here.) However, as the site’s popularity soared and more and more people joined, the flavor shifted from design and style to, well, pretty pictures. Pretty pictures of babies. Pretty pictures of cupcakes. Pretty pictures of braided hair. Pinterest has turned into such a lady cliche, I can hardly stand it. Going to the site feels like going to a scrapbooking convention-you get the sense that you are surrounded by a lot of crafty DIY types who would happily spend four hours making a chandelier out of old Christmas ornaments. I still enjoy the site, and continue to use it to pin countless variations on the all-white bedding that I want. (And that I will never be allowed to have, because I am the clumsiest person alive, and as soon as I had all white bedding I would probably manage to spill coffee, Diet Coke and red wine on it all at once.) But it is impossible to not acknowledge how ridiculous Pinterest has become. One woman I follow has an entire board dedicated to pictures of petit fours.

Herewith, I present what I have deduced as the top five category trends on Pinterest.

1. Wedding Inspirations

Pinterest’s bread and butter seems, inarguably, to be as a site where women can organize their wedding inspiration photos. For those who are actually engaged, this is an understandable and acceptable way to keep track of your ideas. Those of us who are not engaged have to get a little more creative, so that it is not immediately clear to all of our followers that we are very much putting the cart before the horse and planning a wedding even though no one has  expressed any interest in actually marrying us. My board for this creepy behavior is called Tablescapes. Because technically, I could throw a party with beautiful place settings and lush floral arrangements at any time. Like, I just pinned this picture because I like the candles. No big deal.

Pretty subtle, no?

2. Animals and Babies

Pinterest users also love pictures of babies and animals doing seasonally appropriate, adorable things. In the fall it would not be unlikely to find a picture of kittens inside of a pumpkin resting on a bucket of apples, which was itself on an autumnal pile of leaves. Or this one, for the winter holiday season:

Why would you put your baby in a jar!? Come on, people.

 3. Closets

Pinterest is, on the whole, a site for wishful thinking. People pin pictures of sprawling plantation-style homes with giant wrap around porches and label them things like “A porch I would like to have someday.” (Me. I did this). And, well, good f’ing luck with that. But nowhere is this “Dream Big” mentality more evident than in the pictures people post of closets. I don’t know anyone who is so wealthy that they have the extra space and money to convert an entire room into a glamourous closet/sitting room/beauty parlor/speakeasy (seriously, the way they decorate these rooms you would think ladies are having cocktail parties in there). But these kinds of pictures are all over Pinterest. In fact this is one of the top ten most popular pins from the site:

A girl can dream.

4. Desserts

Xojane.com already wrote an article addressing this issue, but there seems to be some sort of unspoken rule among Pinterest users that you cannot post a picture of a dessert unless it is actually three separate desserts that have been forced to mate and create one brave new dessert. For example, here someone has taken popsicles, brownies and cupcakes, all delicious treats that can stand on their own two feet, and made this:

It’s hard to spend any time on Pinterest and not wonder “Who has time for this?”

5. Words of Inspiration

Lastly, people take Pinterest’s function as way to organize inspiration pretty literally; there are always tons of pictures of motivational words, phrases and sayings. You know how at least half of the girls you knew in college had “Live. Laugh. Love” in the bottom of their AIM profile? And then AIM went away? Well, this is where women come to get that same instinct for cheesiness and cliche out of their system.

That’s right, girl! Just because he stopped calling doesn’t mean he wasn’t loving you with all he had.

Finally, lest you think I’m a total crankpot, please enjoy this hilarious picture of two hamsters. I’m embarrassed to tell you how long I laughed over this: