Consortium has now published a draft proposal, edited by Mark Davis of Google and Peter Edberg of Apple, that would introduce a range of skin tones for the human characters among other changes.



These skin tones would be based on the Fitzpatrick scale, a recognized standard for dermatology. The proposed colors include a paler, cream-colored tone all the way up through a dark brown/black with a few variations in between. The draft introduces these five new color swatches as a way to render a single emoji showing a character with the correct skin tone.

To use the new emoji, users would select the emoji person or character and then add a tone. On compatible phones, a single emoji image or glyph would be show up.



The forthcoming Unicode standard (ver. 8.0) will arrive in mid-2015, but there’s no timeline as to when these specific changes will go into effect, or even if they will at this point.

These emoji modifiers would affect all people characters, including those in groups, like COUPLE WITH HEART, for example. However, the swatch would add the same color to both people characters in a group emoji. In those cases, the proposal argues that users could enter emoji for each person separately (e.g. man, type 1-2; woman, type-3) preceded by the generic, but possibly inaccurately colored, group emoji character.

Originally posted by Blue Momo!

I like it but it might backfire given the fact that people love to make racist jokes, now they'll be able to use emojis to do it

Originally posted by Goosey

I don't get it. What colours did they have before?

And is that yellow one supposed to be Chinese? Because that's not very PC.

Originally posted by Pelvic Thrust

Originally posted by Raphy23

Wait, the Simpsons actually exist?

Originally posted by Blue Momo!

That color is supposed to be the "neutral" emoji. Like this one >< You touch it on your iPhone and a set of colorful emojis will pop up, and you pick the color you prefer!

Originally posted by dayydreaam

What about people that are even darker though..