#emojiethnicityupdate

"Skin Tone Modifiers" coming to emoji! Choose an emoji to send, then choose the skin tone. 2015 is going to be a great year!

Source: Emojipedia

Update February 6, 2015:

Finally, the power of unlimited #emojis!

With much discussion about the lack of diversity in the current Emoji standard this week; it stands to reason that many people are not aware of how new Emojis come about.

Image Source: Oyster Mag

Common Emojis requested include black Emoji faces, a middle finger Emoji, volleyball, and a food-favorite; the taco.

Apple is often the focal-point of discussion around Emoji, but they are neither the creator of Emoji, nor the ones in control of the standard. The Unicode Consortium is the body who decides which new characters should be supported by future fonts and operating systems. As such, they are responsible for approving, and standardising symbols, glyphs, and new Emoji characters.

The good news

The next Unicode update - Unicode 7.0 - is in beta as of March 2014, and due to be finalized in June 2014. Unicode 7.0 includes a bunch of new Emoji characters, including popular requests such as a spider and middle finger Emoji.

The bad news

This next Emoji update does not increase the diversity of the faces available. This means no black Emojis, nor an increase to the Emoji from any race or ethnicity this time around.

This doesn't preclude a future update from including many more highly requested Emoji characters. It just won't be this year.

What's next

Emoji updates are first made final by the Unicode Consortium, which is required so that all platforms (iOS, Android, Windows, OS X) agree on which characters to create.

Once Unicode 7.0 goes final, it is then over to Apple, Google and Microsoft to create the artwork and include these characters in a future OS revision.