The Emoji emoticons are one of the most used elements in users' day-to-day communication. And it is that these nice faces are no longer present only in applications as WhatsApp, are also an inherent part of social networks, communication platforms or even the keyboards themselves that smartphones bring with them to be able to use them anywhere.If their use is so widespread, why not adapt them for all kinds of people? The idea is already proposed so that all races are represented thanks to a skin tone selector.
The proposal, which is still in very early phase, comes from the consortium Unicode , the standard that regulates the creation and reproduction of these emoticons to be able to be used universally through all kinds of devices. This is a draft edited by Mark Davis on behalf of Google, and byPeter Edberg from Apple, where a whole range of skin colors is collected for the well-known emoticons . A tool that would allow the user to choose more appropriately the color of the face for the different expressions or representations of these Emoji
According to this proposal, the idea is that the user can make a long press on the emoticons of faces (not the yellow smileys) and display up to five skin tone variables These variables arise directly from the Fitzpatrick scale, recognized in the field of dermatology. From a color light pink to a dark black, passing through different variations. With this, both sender and receiver would see the same image on the screen, intentionally noting the skin tone of the Emoji emoticon
Furthermore, according to the proposal, this hue-shifting feature would not only affect individual smileys. Those representations of couples and families would also be accommodated in this update. In this way, the user would be able to change the skin tone of each character independently before sending it through the application or messaging service that is using.
This new tool is designed for devices that have full support for Emoji emoticons And the idea is to choose the representation and the tone so that the final representation shows up clearly. However, for other older terminals there are also variants that help to demonstrate the intentionality of these new emoticons even though they do not allow them to be represented faithfully. Thus, non-compatible terminals will show the chosen emoticon and, next to it, a square with the skin tone that you want to represent. Something that even extends to terminals with black and white screens, where the emoticon would be displayed and a square next to it that would try to represent the darkness of the tone according to the density of pixels that accumulate in it
At the moment this diversity tool is in an early phase and is expected to reach the standard of Unicode for mid-year 2015 However, this is a update and not a new standard, so we will have to wait to see if the companies end up implementing it to please users who do not feel represented by this current collection of emoticons. Symbols that originally come from the Japanese operators and that little by little have become universal and expanded thanks to the standardization service of Unicode, and from other companies such as Apple, who proposed the appearance of homosexual couplesin your collection.
