Skin colour was not the only problem with emoji in 2014. ( CC-BY 4.0 images taken from Twemoji version 1.4.0.) When Twitter, Apple and others applied themselves to emoji’s more realistic characters, such as GIRL (👧), BOY (👦), WOMAN (👩) or MAN (👨), there was no escaping the fact that they were, to an emoji, white. Misguided or not, the typical yellow-faced smiley at least aspired to the idea that emoji could transcend race. 9, 10 Whether one saw a crude yellow-face stereotype or a white person masquerading as some impossible, aracial ideal, emoji’s yellow-skinned smileys have never been without baggage. Matt Groening, creator of The Simpsons, claimed to have chosen the colour yellow solely because it might catch the eye of a channel-hopping viewer, but that raised the question of why the show’s non-white characters were given brown skin of various hues. Moreover, many commentators drew parallels between emoji’s smiling yellow faces and the bright yellow cartoon characters depicted in The Simpsons, 5, 7, 8 a popular animated series, but, despite their stylised skin colour, Bart, Homer, Lisa, Maggie and Marge were plainly meant to be white. Most obviously, emoji’s yellow smileys sailed perilously close to invoking the old-fashioned stereotype of the “yellow-skinned” Asian - an issue that went unremarked (or, worse, unnoticed) for an uncomfortably long time. It was a deliberately unrealistic skin colour, a hand-me-down from the days of Harvey Ball’s original 1963 smileys that happened to be so conspicuously artificial as to head off any perception of racial discrimination. 2, 3 And take, for example, the cartoonish yellow colour sported by smileys across the emoji spectrum (including those available on Twitter, as shown above 4).
#Apple emoji 1.0 update#
( CC-BY 4.0 images taken from Twemoji version 1.4.0.)Ĭonsider the state of emoji in June 2014, just after their first major update since standardisation in 2010. Fifteen years later, when they had morphed into full-colour, professionally-drawn icons promoted by a bevy of global tech giants, emoji’s ongoing gender bias and cultural insensitivity was starting to look less naïve than it was wilfully ignorant.
Emoji has always had an ambiguous relationship with culture, ethnicity and gender - which was forgivable, perhaps, in 1999, when emoji were monochromatic 12 × 12 icons unable to communicate anything much more nuanced than “this is a person’s face”. This yearly tradition is much younger than emoji itself. This year, the emoji gods sent down their new creations - focused on improving representation of people with disabilities - on the 5 th of February. Every year or so for the past half-decade, successive batches of new emoji have issued forth from the hallowed conference rooms of the Unicode Consortium.
Start at PART 1, continue to PART 7 or view ALL POSTS in the series.
#Apple emoji 1.0 series#
This is the sixth in a series of thirteen posts on Emoji (😂).
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