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Illinois | Culture

How to Use Pinterest to Curate Your Style

Hallie Jasnoch Student Contributor, University of Illinois - Urbana-Champaign
This article is written by a student writer from the Her Campus at Illinois chapter and does not reflect the views of Her Campus.

Figuring out your personal style can be hard. With the rise of so many different aesthetics on social media, you may feel lost on where to start. Pinterest, however, is an easy way to start figuring out what you like, and maybe even find some things to buy!

Step 1: Start with a simple search

Starting is always the scariest part. If you just search “Outfits” on Pinterest, you’ll get thousands of posts of varying aesthetics and trends. It may seem overwhelming, but it’s perfect. From here, you may see things you like, or that you think are absolutely horrendous, which is exactly the point. You need to see a variety of things to narrow down what you like. After the general search, you could go less broad depending on what you seem to like, or you could stay with the general search. Whatever works best for you!

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Photo by Sharum Ari

Step 2: Start Saving

This is where you really start to narrow down your style. After your general search, start saving the posts you like. It could seem all over the place, but saving anything you like is part of the process. This process could be over the course of 30 minutes or 30 days, but either way, you’ll start to get a general feel for what you like. After you feel pretty good about what you’ve saved, go scroll through your own board of the outfits. You may start to notice patterns, maybe color, maybe style that you can work from. Now, you can do an even more specific search.

Step 3: Narrowing it down

Now that you have a baseline for what you like, get creative. Go on a deeper dive into what you like! Do a more specific search for outfits or aesthetics you like! Having a general idea of what you like can allow you to get a more specific idea of what you want out of your style. Whether it’s comfort or glam, you can now use Pinterest to get far more specific about your style, and really perfect it.

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Zen Chung Via Unsplash

Step 4: Let’s get shopping!

Once you have a feel for your aesthetic, you can start shopping around for pieces you think could make your perfect wardrobe. You can search on Pinterest or elsewhere for your perfect pieces, now that you know what you want. I know I’m personally very glad that Pinterest has a shopping feature, I feel like I buy so much of my clothes from there! It all started with a general search, and now you can feel confident in your most authentic and stylish outfits!

Friendly Reminder: Specificity Can Be Limiting

Although it seems like you may be able to find one specific aesthetic for yourself, the joy of finding your style is experimentation! The joy of Pinterest is that you can see outfits from multiple different styles or aesthetics, and you can use your own creativity to pull from any of them! Your style is YOURS, and, hopefully, you can find your style with the help from Pinterest!

Hallie Jasnoch

Illinois '28

I'm a freshman studying journalism, hoping to go into sports media. I am a member of the Marching Illini Color Guard, as well as Legend Dance Company on campus.