Since the advent of smileys back in ancient, pre-iPhone times, people have always loved sending emotes to one another. The little faces might not be much, but a simple smile or a wink can change the tone of a message: what could sound bored or detached suddenly seems a little more personal. Of course, it's not always the best solution, but smileys are a nice little way to tweak a message.
Over the past few years, smileys have gotten far more complicated. What began as a simple combination of colon and parenthesis became a tiny image, then a larger one; nowadays, there are full-sized smileys in a million different varieties. In today's world, it's not a smiley, it's an 'emoji.'
Originally from Japan, emoji is a portmanteau of the words for 'picture' and 'character,' and seemingly every social media network and instant messaging service on the planet has its own set. While the little faces are fun to use (and great for harassing friends), they're not exactly diverse. The emojis started off as the standard yellow, but over the years, more and more people have been asking for something a bit more representative. Thankfully, it seems it won't be long before that finally happens.
As part of a proposed update, the Unicode Consortium (the organization that maintains and updates emojis) wants to update the emotes to be much more inclusive:
Breaking news: black emojis coming in 2015! And brown. And lighter-brown. And pale. https://t.co/4RsF10ZWhX pic.twitter.com/JuALhVTtJ5
— ⭐ Get Emoji ⭐ (@GetEmoji) November 4, 2014
Unicode update 8.0, if all goes as planned, will introduce different skin tones to the characters. Basically, the update works as a series of different color codes that allows for different skin tones to be applied to emojis. With the update, emojis can be colored in six different shades, and what started off as little yellow smiles will suddenly look much more human.
As it stands, the update is still in draft form, and there's a long ways to go before the new emojis reach your phone. Unicode still has to finalize the 8.0 update, then send it to various services that use emojis. From there, those individual services will have to release updates for their operating systems, and then the new emojis will be available for use. The process isn't unheard of, but it will take time to complete.
Even in its early stages, it's a nice effort from the Consortium. Emojis were never meant to represent any one race, but even so, a lot of people weren't necessarily happy that there was only one available color. Instead of ignoring the issue and brushing it off, Consortium's stepping up and addressing the issue; there are a lot of organizations that wouldn't have even acknowledged it.
For now, the emojis are still a long ways off. If everything goes according to plan, expect the new emojis to become available sometime in mid-2015.
Photo: Intel Free Press (cropped)
