We're Finally Getting Diverse Emojis!

The Unicode Consortium - the entity that standardises characters for letters, numbers, and symbols, has heard the demand for emojis with diverse skin tones and is adding a range of five skin tone options to emoji characters based on a dermatological measure called the Fitzpatrick scale.

The change will apply to all yellow smiley face emojis, hand emojis, and any emoji with human facial or bodily characteristics. The face emojis are currently predominantly Caucasian in appearance, as are characters like the dancing woman, the man on a bike, the surfer, swimmer, snowboarder, etc. All together, 151 emoji will be affected by the change.

“The Unicode emoji characters for people and body parts are meant to be generic, yet following the precedents set by the original Japanese carrier images, they are often shown with a light skin tone instead of a more generic (inhuman) appearance, such as a yellow/orange color or a silhouette.”

On many phones, users will be able to choose their preferred skin color for a particular emoji by pressing and holding the emoji's default version—which in this case appears to be yellow—and selecting from a miniature palette of options. It will be just like selecting an accented letter by long-pressing a vowel.

No release date has been announced yet.