"Emoji skin tones floated: Should emoji be more racially diverse?"

Image and text from The Christian Science Monitor on-line, 11/4/14.

A new skin tone modifier option could break from guidelines keeping emojis "as neutral as possible" and make the picture symbol more diverse in racial appearance.

The Unicode Consortium – non-profit organization that coordinates the development of the Unicode standard – released a technical report detailing a new method for handling the representation of multi-ethnic groups in emoji, MacRumors reported. The forthcoming Unicode 8.0 update proposes the modifier which would allow users to send human emoji in a range of skin tones.

"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," says the report, which the writers emphasize is still in draft form. The symbol modifier characters are based on the tones of the Fitzpatrick scale, a recognized standard for dermatology, according to the report.

Source: http://www.csmonitor.com/Innovation/Tech/2014/1104/Emoji-skin-tones-floated-Should-emoji-be-more-racially-diverse