About Melanin
Formerly Melaninterest.com — same community, new home.
Why Melanin exists
Melanin is visual discovery built specifically for the global Black diaspora. Pinterest, Tumblr, and the other big visual-search engines were trained on centuries of imagery in which Black faces, Black hair, Black weddings, and Black aesthetics were treated as a niche. Search for “wedding hairstyle” on a mainstream platform and you can scroll for minutes before the algorithm surfaces a 4C texture. Search for “mood board inspiration” and the grid will skew toward the same five Scandinavian palettes that have dominated visual culture for a decade.
We built Melanin to close that gap. Every part of the product — the recommendation graph, the discovery feed, the way pins get clustered into boards, the people we hire to curate trending content — is designed around the question: does this surface what Black users actually came here to see? Our mission is simple. The visual record of Black creativity, culture, and beauty deserves a home where it is the standard, not the exception. Melanin is that home.
From Melaninterest to Melanin
If you found us through an old article, an old pin, or an old bookmark, you probably remember us as Melaninterest.com. That was our first home. We launched the original Melaninterest as a web-first visual discovery platform, built a community of curators and creators, and spent years proving that a dedicated visual platform for the Black diaspora was not just viable — it was overdue.
Then we lost the domain. In late 2025, during a transition between registrars, the melaninterest.com registration lapsed and was picked up before we could recover it. Losing a domain after years of building on it is one of the worst things that can happen to an independent product team. It also forced a decision we had been circling for months. The Melaninterest brand had grown beyond its original web shell. The product deserved a name that was shorter, sharper, easier to say in conversation, and easier to type on a phone keyboard. So we rebuilt as Melanin — same team, same community, same mission — and rebuilt the entire product as a native iOS and Android app, with the web at melaninapp.com as the canonical companion.
Everything you loved about the old Melaninterest.com is here. Your pins, your boards, your followers, your saved inspiration. We migrated it all. The address bar changed; nothing else did. If you arrived here from a press article or a blog post that still links to the old domain, welcome — you are in the right place, and the Melanin team is the same team that built Melaninterest.
What we build
Melanin is a pin-and-board visual discovery app. You save images you love (we call them pins), you organize them into themed collections (we call those boards), and you follow the curators, photographers, designers, and everyday users whose taste resonates with yours. Underneath, the recommendation engine learns what you and people like you save, and surfaces more of it.
Some of the most active corners of the app right now:
- Black wedding inspiration — dresses, decor, jumping the broom, jollof bar setups, traditional Igbo and Yoruba ceremony fits.
- Natural hair — 4C protective styles, locs at every length, fades and waves, twist-outs and silk presses.
- African aesthetic — Ankara prints, kente, agbada styling, contemporary Lagos and Accra street fashion.
- Fashion + beauty — melanin-rich makeup palettes, full-body editorial shoots, plus-size styling.
- Art — Afro-futurist illustration, Black portraiture, contemporary diaspora artists.
- Food — soul food, Caribbean classics, vegan jollof, modern West African plating.
- Travel — Black-owned stays, diaspora itineraries, Year of Return follow-ups.
Creator tools, native iOS and Android apps with proper haptics and image quality, a real recommendation graph, and a content moderation policy that names anti-Blackness, colorism, texturism, and featurism explicitly so users know what this space will not tolerate.
The team
Melanin is a small independent team building this in public. We do not have venture backing, a PR firm, or a marketing department. We have a community.
Patrick — Founder. Patrick is a background-and-mission line goes here. He leads product, engineering, and the day-to-day rebuild of the platform after the Melaninterest domain loss.
Additional team bios will be published as the team grows. If you want to join us, we are hiring — reach out via the contact details below.
Get in touch / Find us
The fastest way to reach the team is hello@melaninapp.com. For press inquiries, partnership requests, or to update an old Melaninterest.com link in an article, use the same address and we will get back to you within two business days.
Download the apps and follow us:
If you wrote about Melaninterest.comin the past and want the link updated to the new domain, drop us a one-line email and we will send you the direct replacement URL. Keeping the diaspora's editorial record intact matters to us as much as it matters to you.
A safer discovery space
Representation also means protection. Our community standards name anti-Blackness, colorism, texturism, featurism, misogynoir, and cultural erasure directly so people know what this space will not normalize.
Read the Community Guidelines