The Unicode Consortium had previously¹ backed only one skin color, a yellow-orange tone that it considered generic². But it threw away that approach after a wide call for more variety.

 

If you're late to the emoji party, they're the characters that use faces and other human-like images to express emotions and ideas. The new plan lets people use emoji that look like them -- and they'll also be able to make groups of emoji in which the faces don't all look like one another.

 

The change would take effect next year; here's how the consortium explains it:

 

"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 precedents³ 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 silhouette⁴.

 

"Unicode Version 8.0 is adding 5 symbol modifier characters that provide for a range of skin tones for human emoji. These characters are based on the six tones of the Fitzpatrick scale, a recognized standard for dermatology (there are many examples of this scale online, such asFitzpatrickSkinType.pdf). The exact shades may vary between implementations."

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