Apple has listened to complaints about its lack of racial diversity in its emoji and has responded. Now you can have a look at the new ones. According to a report by Global News, there will be six choices for skin and hair tone. These will be available across a variety of different characters like the thumbs up, princess, and more. In other words, anything that represents a person has these options. The default color is yellow; to change the color all you have to do is tap and hold to see the drop-down menu with your choices. So in total there are five skin tone choices plus the default yellow option. As of right now, only OS X developers with the beta version can access the new emoji until Apple puts out the new emoji keyboard with the new OS X and iOS release.
Apple had call-outs from users asking more diversity; notably, Miley Cyrus tweeted, on December 18, 2012, “RT if you think there needs to be an #emojiethnicityupdate.” In March 2014, Apple agreed that there was indeed more need for diversity but the tech giant didn’t actually get a final say; Unicode Consortium, a non-profit organization that sets the standards, had to first approve any changes. It wasn’t until November 2014 that the Unicode Consortium said it was considering adding five skin tone colors. The new keyboard will also have 30 new flag options.
