Finally, guys! After years and years (how long have we had emojis? Was there life before?), emojiis are finally getting racially, sexually and culturally diverse.
Yesterday, people testing out Apple’s new updates (set to be OS X 10. 10.3 on your computer and iOS 8.3 on your phone, public beta testing is supposedly taking place in March, no word on when we’ll all get it) came across a whole bunch of new emojis that now include six different skin colours, variations on same sex/different sex families and flags from more countries, including Australia, Sweden, South Africa, Brazil and Canada.
In slightly less important news, they’ve also changed the watch to an Apple watch and the phone to look more like an iPhone 6.
There’s been a fair old bit of hubbub at the skin tone of the yellow emojis, but an Apple analyst has said that yellow isn’t meant to represent Asian skintone as people are assuming, but is instead, meant to be the default colour – like the smiley faces, or the Simpsons.
This is obviously truly tremendous news in terms of representation. One would imagine that now they’ve tackled this overriding and way-behind-schedule problem, perhaps the emoji team might next turn their attention to the much less important but still oh-so-relevent issue of the representation of food?
Like, where are the crisps guys? Where are the crisps.
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This article originally appeared on The Debrief.