Sometimes, as I scroll through the beautifully shaped and aesthetically pleasing squares of Pinterest, I start to feel slightly sick; in seconds, my daily scroll through the curated squares becomes a swirl of self-doubt and sadness. Spending time on an app made to inspire, I start to feel not a sense of peace, happiness, and organization, but the creeping anxieties of stress and perfectionism. Why doesn’t my life look like the lives of the people on Pinterest?

The most popular vision board engine and manifestation hotspot, Pinterest, is one of Gen Z’s biggest trend trackers. Formed for inspiration, organization, and commerce, Pinterest is the third most popular lifestyle app on the Apple iOS App Store, with over 578 million monthly users worldwide. Teenagers, especially Boulder High students, love it. So what’s wrong with it?

I believe that Pinterest is our society’s most subconscious form of social media. Often, users don’t classify it as a social media platform, even though it incorporates features like followers, likes, and saves. It isn’t a purely negative environment, though — Elsa Dean-Kendall, ‘27, says, “I find that Pinterest has given me a lot of artistic inspiration. Sometimes that has negative consequences, but I think overall it actually encourages me to be my more authentic, unique self.” Additionally, Ben Olson, ‘27, claims, “It makes me feel motivated to get up and do things.” 

However, Pinterest doesn’t always create a positive culture. Pinterest has occasionally been linked to mental health drawbacks, most notably the phenomenon of “Pinterest Perfection.” The idealized, unrealistic photos that the popular app portrays are snapshots of perfection, which can evoke deep feelings of inadequacy. Social comparison and self-doubt already plague teenagers as social media increases the prevalence of depression and anxiety— but Pinterest is often seen as an app firmly outside of the swirling drain of Instagram and TikTok, when, instead, it holds just as much weight as they do. When asked if she has ever felt feelings of inadequacy when scrolling Pinterest, Teagan Irland, ‘27, says, “Yes. It’s like: I’ll never be that aesthetic.”

Now, don’t get me wrong— I love Pinterest. I spend an embarrassing amount of time each day on this app, saving things to my 50 perfectly curated boards, which are organized by mood. Anything from Halloween costumes to no-bake cookie dough recipes gets saved as inspiration and marked by my brain as a quick dopamine hit. However, when using Pinterest, you have to understand that what you’re looking at isn’t always real. It is an out-of-context, curated, picturesque snapshot of a single moment in time. Just like we’re taught that posts on Instagram or TikTok aren’t always real, neither are the ones on Pinterest. The app has the innate ability to ruin self-confidence and cause insecurity: an endless stream of positive and motivational content can lead to seriously suffocating perfectionism. 

Pinterest is, indisputably, a form of social media. That means that it comes with a variety of pros and cons- artistic freedom paired with the ability to continue a culture of comparison. Pinterest has the perfect algorithm to negatively affect mental health, the same as all other forms of social media. It also means that we, as a society, need to treat it like what it is: a manifestation engine that has the ability to hurt.