Diverse emojis

Emojis are going to become more racially diverse, with the first white and black emoji coming out next year. Unicode Consortium, the organization that develops emoji, said that a diverse range of skin tones will be available when Unicode Version 8.0 launches in June 2015. This will include not only the existing yellow, but five other shades, ranging from pink to brown to black, according to Mashable.

Emojis were developed in Japan in 1999 for mobile phones. In Japanese, emoji means picture-writing-character. The selection of emojis was quite small when they were launched, but over time the variety of emotions and activities they express has expanded. Apple updated its emoji collection in 2012 to include a lesbian and homosexual couple, for example. Even then, racially diverse emojis were still missing from the selection.

"The main goal is to help improve the interoperability of emoji characters across implementations by providing guidelines and data," the company announced this week.

Unicode said it recognized that "people all over the world want to have emoji that reflect more human diversity, especially for skin tone." According to the company, the emoji characters for people and body parts are meant to be generic, "yet following the precedents set by the original Japanese images, the little human pictures are often shown with a light skin tone instead of a more generic (inhuman) appearance, such as a yellow/orange color or a silhouette."

The announcment has gone viral, with more than 1,000 tweets per hour mentioning the topic, according to Topsy:

Unicode Version 8.0 will be adding five symbol modifier characters that provide for a range of skin tones for human emoji. These characters will be based on the tones of the Fitzpatrick scale, a recognized standard for dermatology (there are many examples of this scale online, such as FitzpatrickSkinType.pdf).

However, the company could not commit to represent all types of diversity in human appearance, such as different hair styles and color, use of eyeglasses, various kinds of facial hair, different body shapes or different headwear. "It is beyond the scope of Unicode to provide an encoding-based mechanism for representing every aspect of human appearance diversity that emoji users might want to indicate," the company stated.

Emojis for politicians?

In the run-up to this week's midterm elections in the US, the White House introduced an emoji-based campaign designed to appeal to younger voters - the millennials, or the generation born between 1980 and 2004 - and the growing number of smartphone users:

The initiative backfired and was abandoned only a few days later when it was widely reported that young voters felt offended by the White House's underestimation of their political knowledge and engagement with issues.

Perhaps the White House image campaign didn't take on because the little pictures were introduced from a position of authority. In Germany, bloggers are finding their own way for depicting Angela Merkel. While the emoji doesn't bare any physical resemblence to the chancellor, it does replicate quite well her signature triangular hand gesture :