The Unicode Consortium recently revealed a range of emoji skin tone modifiers that it plans to roll out as an update to the current standard in a draft proposal. The updated standard finally brings a variety of ethnicities to the increasingly popular pictographs. This is the first time the consortium has introduced an option to modify characters to represent different ethnicities.
The consortium said the following regarding the matter:
People all over the world want to have emoji that reflect more human diversity, especially for skin tone. The Unicode emoji characters for people and body parts are meant to be generic, yet following the precedents set by the original Japanese carrier images, they 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 functionality of the implementation is set to allow users to apply skin colors to a select group of characters as a font modifier. This keeps the set of icons rather manageable considering the set of icons is already quite expansive. The default method is set to display a select character, a color swatch and the combined result. The shorthand-version simply displays the character and swatch glyph to be applied.
We’ll have to wait and see when this ethnic set of icons is ready to be implemented.
Source: Unicode (Report)
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