Emoji Alert: Hijab-Wearing, Breastfeeding Woman On Cards

The emoji scene has seen big changes this year. After the skin colour inclusion in every human emoji, the Unicode Consortium has given the green signal for emojis that show a woman wearing a hijab, woman breastfeeding a baby and a person doing yoga. While the proposal for the new emojis has been accepted, the actual ones on your smartphones will come in next year. Unicode, which sets the global standard for emojis, will come up with 51 icons.

As emoticons are fast replacing our mode of conversation from words to emojis, the total number of emojis will reach 1,724, as reported by The Telegraph.

The inclusion of a hijab-wearing emoji came after a 15-year-old girl from Germany, Rayouf Alhumedhi, petitioned for the addition of such an emoji. A hijab-wearing girl, she proposed it to Unicode stating that there was no emoji to represent her.

The new introduction list also includes breastfeeding', 'bearded person', 'older adult', reflecting the current lack of grandparent icons.

Some more emojis that will be released next year are that of a head exploding, a face with open mouth vomiting and a man and woman practising yoga, as reported by The Guardian.

The new list of Unicode-10 is making efforts to make the emojis as diverse and inclusive as possible. In recent times, smartphone makers have included a variety of skin tones, hair colour and cultural and religious references which have also helped in reinforcing the stereotypes.

At the beginning of this year, Google called for emojis that reflect women in the workplace while Apple added gender neutral versions of some of female-focussed emojis that represented work like cutting hair as being only a female’s job.

Alhumedhi wrote on Twitter that she is “very-excited” about this new emoji of a woman in hijab.

Some other upcoming emojis include a zombie, a vampire, a person holding their finger to their mouth, and a T-Rex. However, Apple is going to add a few emojis from the previous set -- Unicode 9 -- and these emojis will represent facepalm, selfie, a clown and a pregnant woman.

Picture credit- Fortune