Apple just pushed the latest OS X update seed to developers and hiding inside is a nice surprise: a brand new roster of racially diverse emoji. Finally!
It’s been a long time coming. People have been crowing for years about the lack of racial diversity in Apple’s emoji selection. However, Apple’s consistently passed the buck to the Unicode Consortium, the group technically responsible for emoji standardisation. Late last year, the tiny council of type arbiters finally conceded and said it would create a whole bunch of new emoji with a much wider range of skin tones.
That’s a few of Apple’s renditions above. Basically, when you select any emoji that contains people, you’re offered a menu of skin tones — and hair colours — to go along with it. Obviously, there are more than six combinations of hair and skin colour amongst the many billions of humans on Earth. But hey, these new emoji are certainly a step in the right direction. That yellow though. Is that “Asian” or “jaundice”? Maybe it’s supposed to be like, a smiley-face skin tone? Who knows.
What do you think? Did Apple and the font folks at Unicode do a good job with racial diversity in emoji?