The social giant Facebook announced on June 1st, 2016, that it's rolling out a new set of emoji designed specifically for its Messenger app, and that is an array of new skin tones and gender options.
Messenger has always allowed users to use the diverse emoji offered via smartphone or computer. Now, these diverse emojis are baked straight into Messenger. With the update, users have access to over 1,500 new emojis - 100 of which were designed "to better reflect gender and skin tones" with gender-agnostic options and multi-colored emojis.
The hand emoji for example, previously has yellow as default color. Now users can pick from five other skin tone approved by the Unicode Consortium (a nonprofit in charge of the software standard for how text and characters are represented on devices). The new colors include red hair "ginger".
The new female emojis include a pedestrian, police officer, jogger, swimmer and surfer.
Facebook wrote in a blog post:
"Now, using Messenger emojis, you'll see a female police officer, runner, pedestrian, surfer and swimmer for the very first time, and we'll keep rolling these out.
To make users easier to choose the wider array of choices, the Messenger composer will now include an emoji picker. What users need to do is to just tap the emoji icon at the left of the composer. Users can now set their preferred hair color and skin tone so their choice will become default. This will avoid them in having to pick every time. Otherwise, the choice will remain as yellow.
"Emojis are one of the most important ways we communicate emotion to each other," said Messenger product manager Tony Leach. "We are in a great position to fix this problem." And, "we also took the time to better represent the real world."
According to Facebook, the update for Messenger's emoji isn't just to represent the diversity of its users that now has passed 900 million users in April, three months after hitting 800 million (Facebook itself is now having more than 1.6 billion users.).
The company wants to make a uniform experience across iOS and Android devices.
Leach also said that, "this will be one of the first times that people will be able to use an app on the Web, iOS and Android to set the color of the skin tone of a lot of the emojis."
Facebook's adoption to a wider choice of colors and genders also came from pressures in recent years that wanted it to put more diverse palette.
Emoji Expanding The Border Of Languages
Emoji is somehow a language on its own. To be exact, it has become the universal language which everyone understands because it communicates through visuals. By communicating using those simple and unique presentation, people can share their thoughts without even talking (writing). And for that, emoji can extend a language to have more dialects.
This get people excited because messaging is now becoming more fun. This is what Facebook wants, and that is to make more users use its product for a longer period of time.
Tracing emoji back to its origin, people can say that their start began in Asia in the mid-1990s. When its use expanded, emoji quickly replaced words on many messages, and each character expanded beyond their original white color to include yellow/orange color and more.
Read: Sticker Characters: Doing What Others Can't
And as for Messenger, the use of emoji has also become something common. Out of 10 mobile messages, nearly one of the message include at least one emoji, Leach said. This means, 9 out of 10 users use emoji.
Emojis should reflect the 6.5 billion people around the world who use them, said Leach.