Call it first-world problems if you will, but there’s a fair bit of geeks out there who apparently want a more racially diverse palette of emoji to choose from. What happened was, after Miley Cyrus tweeted angrily on the topic back in 2012, the internet rallied quickly behind the emoji-diversity revolution.
In response, Apple pledged to introduce racially diverse emoji, but blamed the Unicode Consortium (the group responsible for emoji standardisation) for dragging their feet. Unicode promptly responded, and laid out the plan for emoji with a “range of skin tones” in late 2014.
And now, it seems as if the great emoji battle is almost over. In the latest developer version of OS X, there’s a placeholder for five new skin colors for every emoji, following the recognized standard of the Fitzpatrick scale, according to Macrumors.
In OS X 10.10.3 beta, the “Emoji & Symbols” palette can be accessed from the Edit menu in most apps or by pressing Control + Command + Space. Along with renaming the Special Characters menu option Apple also added a new drop down arrow on all the human emojis that lets you select between five different skin tones.
Macrumors’ Sachin Patel also noticed that Apple changed the emoji sheet so that all characters display on a single scrollable page. The emoji are still divided into their separate sections, and you can jump straight to the “Travel and Places” emoji by clicking the section icons at the bottom.
Other emoji additions include some blank spaces for some of the new pictograms your keyboard will get as soon as Apple updates to the Unicode 8.0 standard.
We are as confused as you as to whether this is anything of significance or not. Let’s go with the latter.