The kids are all about their emojis these days, but you might have noticed that they're not exactly the most racially diverse group of icons in the world.
That looks set to change however with a new update coming down the line at some stage in 2015, that will finally introduce a little bit of diversity in to the line up of characters available for you to choose when you're messaging your mates about the lolz or megachats, or whatever it is the kids are on about these days. Miley Cyrus is it? Is she still relevant?
Anyway, Unicode Consortium, the people behind the emoji, stated that this has been a while in the making, as they've had a lot of requests in the last few years to change things: "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 new characters will expand on that generic yellow-orange tone and will now provide six new skin tones, based on "the Fitzpatrick scale, a recognized standard for dermatology".
Via Apple Insider/NPR. Main image via 9to5Mac.com
