Racially diverse emoji are coming to a phone near you
Multi-racial smartphone users, rejoice! Unicode Consortium, the company behind the animated characters used to express emotion, has announced in a report yesterday that it will add six skin tones to the emoji keyboard.
Multiracial smartphone users, rejoice! Unicode Consortium, the company behind Apple's emoji, has announced in a report yesterday that it will add six skin tones to the emoji keyboard. Emoji are animated characters used to express emotion.
"People all over the world want to have emoji that reflect more human diversity, especially for skin tone," the report reads. The racially inclusive additions will appear when Unicode Version 8.0 launches in June 2015.
Celebrities like Tahj Mowry and Miley Cyrus have spoken out in the past about the need for more racially diverse emojis.
Many Twitter users, including Cyrus, adopted the hashtag #emjoiethnicityupdate to draw attention to the issue and, back in March, Apple acknowledged concerns, promising more diverse emojis.
According to the Unicode Consortium report, the company suggests applying the new skin tone palette to a bare minimum set of characters, including the emoji of a boy and girl holding hands, the Santa emoji, and the baby emoji. The yellow emojis, hand sign emojis, and dancing woman in a red dress emoji are among the optional emoji the report suggests applying the diversity code to.
The racially updated Unicode emojis won't arrive for seven months. In the meantime, there are already emoticons that represent black and brown people. Oju Africa, a tech startup out of the African country Mauritania, created a set of "Afro Emoticons" months ago. The free Oju Africa app is available in the Google Play Store for Android.
[Dazed]