Racial Diversity In ‘Emoji’ Bundled With Skin-Tone Modifier Coming In 2015

The emoticons app "Emoji" is getting a revamp, much to the excitement of smartphone users. Reportedly, the Unicode Consortium via Emojipedia has published a technical report, spilling the particulars in developing the representation of "multi-ethnic groups" in emoji.

According to earlier guidelines, the emoji representation should be neutral, when it comes to race, ethnicity and gender. The same regulation also stated that, in the case of any specific racial cue or gender, the emoji icons can be specific to the race. In any other case, a generic, non-human illustration like a yellow/orange colour or just a silhouette must be used, according to MacRumors.

Unicode 8.0 is the upcoming guideline update and this is expected to change the previous guideline for good. Based on the new rule, not all but certain emojis will get a skin-tone modifier, which lets the users to send an emotion by customising the skin tone. Adding cherry on top, the new regulation also states that emoji users will be able to send "couple emoticons" with different skin tones for individuals.

As far as the release date goes, the renewed emoji will be available for a download starting mid-2015. At this point, the Unicode 8.0 update's skin tone and racial diversity alterations are just proposals and as time goes by, we will know more on the approval status.

It is worth noting that, the acceptance rate of the proposed emoji is relatively slow. Owing to the fact that, none of the major OS platforms support the currently-available Unicode 7.0 emoji, released in the beginning of 2014. Nonetheless, Apple is one of the OEMs that has demonstrated interest in introducing heterogeneity in its emoji line-up. Katie Cotton, ex-Vice President of Apple's worldwide corporate communications, stated earlier this year that, Apple supports this aspect of emoji and hence it is working with the Unicode Consortium in updating its emoji characters.

In her own words, "Our emoji characters are based on the Unicode standard, which is necessary for them to be displayed properly across many platforms." "There needs to be more diversity in the emoji character set, and we have been working closely with the Unicode Consortium in an effort to update the standard," she added further.

Notably, the recent change to emoji under Apple iOS platform was for iOS 6. During that time, Apple extended the scope of native support outside of Japan. Thereby, the company made the much-loved native support feature available to all Apple users, sans the need to opt for third-party app.

What do you think of the racially diverse emoticons? If this works out, will you be using them? Or will it create problems? Feel free to leave a comment.

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