Emojis to Bring Diversity to the Keyboard: App Will Offer New Skin Tone Shades Based on 'Recognized Standard for Dermatology'

The tiny smileys and picture icons used in text messages and other applications are about to get more diverse --literally

Mashable revealed that The Unicode Consortium, which administers these so-called "emojis," next year "will add five symbol modifier characters ... to generate a range of skin tones on their human-like emoji."

According to the techonoly blog, emojis are meant "to be generic." Still, the faces are "invariably light-toned or yellow, leaving vast swaths of the human population unrepresented."

The traditional yellowish emojis are not going away, however. Instead, users will be able to modify those icons with a skin tone of their choice, possibly by long-pressing a particular emoji character.

"Calls for more racially diverse emojis ... have been going on for over a year," Britain's Daily Mail noted. "The default emoji face was designed to be generic, but is Caucasian, rather than an unrealistic shade such as bright yellow, leading people, including Miley Cyrus, to call for changes to better reflect global diversity."

The Unicode Consortium went so far as to explain how, exactly, it picked the colors it plans to make available.

"'Unicode Version 8.0 is adding five symbol modifier characters that provide for a range of skin tones for human emoji," the group said in a statement. "These characters are based on the six tones of the Fitzpatrick scale, a recognised standard for dermatology. The exact shades may vary between implementations."

Emojis' origin, meanwhile, explains why this change is only coming now, TechCrunch reports.

"Emoji were originally based on Japanese carrier images, where the format was first used and popularized," the technology blog explained. "They weren't encoded into the Unicode Standard until 2010, but having originally grown out of a smaller geographic region, the 'generic' images being used didn't accurately reflect the diversity found elsewhere in the world."

The new Unicode standard will debut in mid-2015, though it is not clear when specific changes will go into effect.