On Thursday, Facebook rolled out some shiny new emojis. But these aren’t just any emojis.
On Facebook’s Messenger app, the new icons add more skin tone and gender options, according to Time. Facebook now even has a redheaded option, along with allowing users to pick their emoji’s skin tone, like on the iPhone. Facebook wants to diversify their emojis in order to better reflect the real world, BBC reports. That’s why these new icons will include professional women, such as police officers. In the future, we might even see some women in IT, business and other industries represented in emojis, if Unicode Consortium approves them.
Unicode Consortium is the non-profit that determines the standardized emoji keyboard that software makers use. On their website, Unicode says “The Unicode Standard does not require a particular appearance for characters that depict people or body parts.” So while Unicode is not opposed to diverse emojis, but they do take a while to be created.
TL;DR- diversity is coming to Messenger, but it will take time to be fully implemented.