Proposed emoji changes would bring racial diversity to smiley faces

A new proposal drafted by the Unicode Consortium would introduce more racial diversity into the popular emoji characters used in messages on smartphones. The proposal, 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.

Proposed emoji changes could bring racial diversity

To use the new emoji, users would select the emoji person or character and then add a tone. 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.

Proposed emoji changes could bring racial diversity

The skin tone modifiers would work on all people-related characters, including those that depict couples. A possibility for emoji with couples would be to enter in the skin tone value for each person separately.

Right now, the proposal is still a draft and there is no timeline for implementation so we don't know when it will reach your phones.

Source: TechCrunch

Chuong Nguyen

Chuong's passion for gadgets began with the humble PDA. Since then, he has covered a range of consumer and enterprise devices, raning from smartphones to tablets, laptops to desktops and everything in between for publications like Pocketnow, Digital Trends, Wareable, Paste Magazine, and TechRadar in the past before joining the awesome team at Windows Central. Based in the San Francisco Bay Area, when not working, he likes exploring the diverse and eclectic food scene, taking short jaunts to wine country, soaking in the sun along California's coast, consuming news, and finding new hiking trails.