Redheads might soon be joining the emoji character set, according to a report by Emojipedia which we first spotted on The Verge.
The report confirms that redheads are on the agenda at the Unicode technical tommittee meeting next week hosted at the Apple campus in Cupertino, California.
New emoji are decided on by a non-profit organisation called the Unicode Consortium.
Emojipedia has been lobbying since 2015 to get redheads added to emoji. It said that the most frequent complaint from its users over the past three months has been a lack of a redhead emoji, perhaps a little surprising given that only 1-2% of the population have red hair.
But it's not yet clear exactly how the emojis will be implemented. There's a few options, which Emojipedia founder Jeremy Burge outlined in a proposal for Unicode.
The simplest option would be to add a "person with red hair" emoji, in which you could change the skin tone as you can currently do with a person with blonde hair, for instance. But the proposal also includes "tag" options.
With the "hair colour tag option," for instance, redheads can feature on any emoji and skin tone combination (as pictured at the top). And a tag option would support all human gestures, the proposal says.
Also up for discussion is whether to introduce a new skin tone – a display of pale white skin with red hair, as pictured below.
If the Unicode decided to support redhead emoji, it would likely appear in 2018 at the earliest, Emojipedia said.
And it also pointed out that no formal decision has been made on whether a redhead emoji should or would be approved at all.
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