20 Years of Anime Art Trends, From 8.7 Million Danbooru Posts

How has anime art changed in 20 years? We measured it across 8.7 million safe-for-work posts on Danbooru, one of the largest anime art archives, by counting the tags on every post from 2006 to 2025.

Four changes stand out:

• Black, white and grey hair have overtaken blonde and brown as the most drawn hair colours.
• Male characters are nearly three times as common as they were in 2010.
• No franchise dominates any more. Touhou had over a third of posts in 2010; today's leader has about 5%.
• The artists are increasingly outside Japan. The share of posts with an English caption from the artist has gone from almost none to 13.8%.

Hair: black, white and pink are in

In 2008, blonde was the most common hair colour on Danbooru, at 21.3% of hair-colour tags. Black overtook both in 2022 and is now the most common single colour, at 17.0%.

White and grey hair are tagged separately on Danbooru but are often hard to tell apart. Taken together, they've doubled from 8.6% to 17.0%, and they've matched or beaten every single colour since 2020. Pink has risen from 5.7% to 8.7%, while brown has fallen to 13.1%.

Eyes show a similar shift. Brown eyes have fallen from 14.3% of eye-colour tags in 2010 to 7.8% in 2025. Purple eyes have risen from 7.5% to 12.4%, and yellow from 7.7% to 11.2%. Blue is still the most common, at 23.2%.

Single-colour hair is giving way to designs with several colours. Posts tagged "multicolored hair" have gone from 0.8% in 2008 to 14.1% in 2025, and "streaked hair" from almost none to 5.1%. That's a hallmark of gacha game designs, where every character needs to stand out on a small screen.

What characters wear

Halos barely existed in 2010, at 0.2% of posts. They peaked at 8.4% in 2023, largely thanks to Blue Archive, whose characters all wear one. Black jackets have gone from 0.2% to 5.4%, and earrings from 2.5% to 9.1%.

School uniforms peaked at 19.1% in 2006 and are down to 7.9%. Hats have fallen from 20.8% to 13.7%: Touhou, a series full of hats, dominated Danbooru in its early years.

The biggest single change is who's being drawn. Posts tagged "male focus" have gone from 5.3% in 2010 to 14.2% in 2025. Games with large male casts, such as Genshin Impact, Honkai: Star Rail and Tears of Themis, have brought in fans who want them drawn.

The details got edgier

Characters now come with more edge:

• Piercings rose from 0.09% of posts to 1.7%.
• Black nail polish rose from 0.11% to 1.5%.
• Tattoos more than doubled, to 1.9%.
• Sharp, shark-like teeth went from 0.24% to 1.2%.
• A mole under the eye is now on 2.6% of posts, a small detail that has become a recognisable design trope.

Modern life has crept in too. Smartphones were almost absent in 2010 (0.03%) and now appear on 1.2% of posts. The "heart hands" pose has grown from 0.14% to 0.58%, mostly since 2022.

One franchise used to rule

In 2010, Touhou alone accounted for 35.3% of all safe-for-work posts on Danbooru. No franchise has come close since. KanColle took over in 2014 at 22.2%, and Blue Archive has led since 2023 with just 8.2% at its peak. In 2025, Blue Archive and Touhou tied at 5.4%.

Fandom has spread out. The top 10 franchises made up 60% of posts in 2014 and 35% in 2025. A long tail of gacha games, VTubers and seasonal anime now shares the attention.

Some of those newcomers left a mark on the tags themselves. VTubers went from nothing to 9.9% of posts in 2021, their peak. Horse ears, from Umamusume, jumped from 0.13% in 2020 to 3.8% in 2022.

Anime art went global

Danbooru tags the language an artist writes their caption in. English captions have risen from 0.7% of posts in 2010 to 13.8% in 2025, Chinese from 0.2% to 4.4%, and Korean from 0.0% to 2.3%. Most captions are still in Japanese, but the artists drawing anime are now spread far wider.

Formats changed too. Four-panel comics ("4koma") have fallen from 2.6% of posts to 0.5%, and black-and-white art from 8.9% to 5.7%. Single, full-colour illustrations of one character now dominate.

Art has also become a business. Posts tagged as commissions rose from 0.1% in 2012 to 3.3% in 2025, and Skeb, a Japanese commission site, went from nothing to 1.0% after 2020. Watermarks have more than doubled since 2022, to 3.8%, during the same years artists became worried about AI scraping.

How we did it

• Data: public Danbooru post metadata up to 18 May 2026. We counted live posts rated general or sensitive, which is 8,720,364 posts across all years. No images were used.
• Measures: for hair and eye colour, we used each colour's share of all colour tags that year. That keeps the figures comparable even as posts get more tags over time. For everything else, it's the share of that year's posts with the tag.
• Years: 2006 to 2025, by the date each post was uploaded. 2026 is left out because it's a partial year.

What this can't tell you

• Danbooru reflects what its users choose to upload and tag, not all anime art.
• Tagging has become more thorough over time, so some rises partly reflect better tagging. Colour shares are measured against each other to limit this.
• Upload year isn't always the year a piece was drawn.
• Popular franchises drive many trends, as Blue Archive did with halos.

Using this data? Please credit BetterWaifu and link back to this page.