Racial diversity amongst our emoji has been an issue for a while, especially now that more and more of our teens are regressing into a pictogram-only lifestyle (because words are dead). Thankfully, it sounds like the Unicode Consortium has heard our cries — diverse emojis are coming. And not the racist kind.
While the new skin tones merely exist in the form of a proposed draft now, we have every reason to believe that they will indeed becoming to an emoji-capable device near you one day soon. After all, even Apple was putting pressure on Unicode to come up with a solution to the almost uniformly white faces we’ve had our disposal thus far. According to the draft:
Unicode Version 8.0 is adding 5 symbol modifier characters that provide for a range of skin tones for human emoji. These characters are based on the six tones of the Fitzpatrick scale, a recognised standard for dermatology (there are many examples of this scale online, such as FitzpatrickSkinType.pdf). The exact shades may vary between implementations.
And once this proposal goes through, even if you’re on a device that doesn’t display diverse colour images, you should be able to still see “what the intended meaning was.
You can see the whole plan over at Unicode here. [Unicode]