How Emoji Skin Tone Modifiers Work and Why They Matter
Five code points that follow person emojis let you pick a skin tone. Here is how the modifier system works and what it encodes. When Apple proposed skin tone modifiers for emojis in 2014, the change looked small. Five new code points, attached to existing person emojis, letting users pick a skin tone instead of accepting the default cartoon yellow. I remember thinking it was a cosmetic addition. After years of watching how people use these modifiers, I see it differently. The system encodes a real choice about representation, and the technical design behind it is more interesting than I gave it credit for. The proposal went through the Unicode Consortium's Emoji Subcommittee and was adopted in Unicode 8.0 in 2015. The design was not arbitrary. It was based on an existing dermatological standard, and it was built to be extensible without breaking backward compatibility. The more I learned about the design decisions, the more I respected the engineering behind what looks like a simple feature. The Five Modifiers and Where They Come From Skin tone modifiers are five code points, U+1F3FB through U+1F3FF, each representing a step on the Fitzpatrick scale. The Fitzpatrick scale is a dermatological classification system that categorizes skin types by how they respond to ultraviolet light, ranging from type one, pale skin that burns easily, to type six, deeply pigmented skin that rarely burns. Read the full article on Emoji Reference, and copy any emoji mentioned from the catalog of 1303+ entries on the home page.