Emojis likely to have different skin-tones available by 2015

The Unicode Consortium, the group responsible for coordinating emoji design, has proposed a plan wherein five skin tones would be added to emojis, the little faces and characters used to express emotions in electronic messaging.

The proposal, put forward by one engineer from Google and one from Apple, aims to reflect more human diversity and especially skin tone in emojis. This would work by allowing people to modify the existing emojis by combining them with five different coloured swatches representing five generally recognized skin-tones. The projected skin tones are based on five of the six categories found in the Fitzpatrick Classification scale founded by dermatologist Thomas Fitzpatrick in 1975 at Harvard Medical School.

While the proposal has not been officially approved yet, reports indicate Unicode’s upcoming version 8.0, which will be released mid 2015, will come with the new feature.