Your Messaging Emoji Could be the Subject of More Racial Diversity in the Future

Diversity is a very good thing, and a new proposal drafted by the Unicode Consortium would introduce more racial diversity into the emoji characters you know and love in all of your favorite messaging apps.

This news comes via TechCrunch. The proposal, which was edited by Google’s Mark Davis and Apple’s Peter Edberg, would bring skin tones, based on the Fitzpatrick scale for dermatology, to emoji characters in five hues ranging from a pale creme to a dark brown. These are outlined below.

you’d simply select the emoji and add a different skin tone

To use the new emoji, you would simply need to select the emoji person or character and then add a different skin tone to the emoji. On compatible phones, a single emoji image or glyph would be show up. On phones that do not support the new font, users will likely see a standard emoji glyph and then a color swatch next to it indicating the skin tone.

These emoji modifiers would affect all people characters, including those in groups, such as a couple of emoji in one. A possibility for emoji with couples would be to enter in the skin tone value for each person separately.

There’s no timeline on if or when these changes will go into effect, since the proposal itself is a “work in progress” and the consortium says that its publication “doesn’t imply endorsement.” The draft can be “updated, replaced, or superseded by other documents at any time.” Still, it really could open up a lot of great options for users in the future should it ever see the light of day.

Would you like to use a different skin color on your emoji?