The case for a black hair emoji for those of fitzpatrick types three, four, and five

James Lu
James Lu
Aug 31, 2018 · 1 min read

Asian Americans are often overlooked when diversity is considered. Many people, particularly Indians and Southeast Asians, have medium or medium dark skin tone (4 or 5), but have black hair.

From the Unicode Consortium:

Emoji Version 11.0 introduces hair components. […] The components include:

Red-haired (ginger)

Curly-haired

White-haired

[…] Note that the hair color blond has already been provided for by an explicit blond man/woman/person emoji . Brown/black-haired are already typical defaults for hair color in human-form emoji.

Just because there’s a brown hair variant of an emoji doesn’t mean there shouldn’t be black haired variants of the same emoji. There is no reason to cluster black and brown hair colors together, except for racial bias. The difference between the two can be distinguished on a phone screen.

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