In the beginning, the emoji gods created the heavens and the earth. Let's call those gods the Unicode Consortium, the organization that governs emoji[1] and other textual characters across platforms, and let's call earth the emoji keyboard. The emoji gods said, "Let there be light," and so 💡 and ☀️ and 🔦 appeared. The emoji gods filled their world with fish and birds and all kinds of living creatures, with hamburgers and soccer balls and cameras, with hundreds of objects and people to use them. The emoji gods saw all that they had made, and it was very good. But not good enough.
For as long as the emoji world has existed, there have been people to observe what was left out of it. People complained that emoji people were too whitewashed and too heteronormative. There were no emoji female doctors. No redheads. Over time, Unicode responded to those requests, adding versions of same-sex couples, single-parent families, old people, young people, gender-neutral people, people of color, even the long-awaited redhead[2]. But still, the emojiverse had gaps. Like the fact that to this day, all of the emoji couples are yellow.
Today, Tinder is throwing its weight behind a campaign to change that. The company is announcing a petition, along with an official emoji proposal, asking Unicode for the option to give customizable skin tone options to the emoji of the couple with the heart. "While emojis for many races have been available since 2015, there are none available for couples," says Rosette Pambakian, Tinder's head of brand. "Now is the time to change that."
The company's emoji proposal will be co-authored by Jennifer 8. Lee, who championed the dumpling emoji and later created Emojination[3], an...