Racially diverse emoji should find their way to your device sometime in 2015. The Unicode Consortium has released a technical report (via Emojipedia) detailing a new method for handling the representation of multi-ethnic groups in emoji.
Previous guidelines have stated that emoji people be “as neutral as possible regarding race, ethnicity, and gender”. Unless the emoji calls out specific gender or racial cues, then a “generic (inhuman) appearance, such as a yellow/orange color or a silhouette” should be used in its place.
A new update, Unicode 8.0, should change all that. The update would introduce a skin tone modifier, which could be added to an emoji, allowing it to be sent using various skin tones. Even emoji couples could sport individually different skin tones. Unicode 8.0’s skin tone and racial diversity proposals are currently only at the draft stage.
In the past, Apple has shown interest in diversifying its emoji lineup, as earlier this year saw the company’s then vice president of worldwide corporate communications Katie Cotton, speaking out in favor of updating the emoji characters on Apple’s devices:
“Tim forwarded your email to me. We agree with you. Our emoji characters are based on the Unicode standard, which is necessary for them to be displayed properly across many platforms. There needs to be more diversity in the emoji character set, and we have been working closely with the Unicode Consortium in an effort to update the standard.”
The most recent emoji related change on Apple’s iOS platform came with the debut of iOS 6, which added native emoji support beyond just Japan, eliminating the need for third-party apps.
