Apple has just introduced families with same-sex parents, along with a variety of skin tones, to its emojis for messages and e-mails. That’s great. The problem? Those two features are mutually exclusive.
It’s terrific that one can now select an emoji family with same-sex parents and choose skin tones for many emoji. If you use any family or couple emoji, however, you have to be content with the default bright yellow skin tone. That’s fine if you live in Legoland, but if Apple is aiming to let people use emojis that look like their families, it’s still missing the mark.
Not only that, but even if one could choose skin tones for the family and couple emoji, multiracial families would still be out of luck, as I feared in a tweet when the feature was first announced. When one chooses a skin tone for an emoji, it applies to the whole emoji.
Surely a company as creative as Apple could come up with a solution, however, such as having the skin-tone pop-up have buttons so one could indicate which person on an emoji gets which colors.
On a less important note than race and gender, let’s talk about hair color. As a proud member of the red-headed league, I’m baffled that there are no red-headed emojis anywhere. Not only that, but gray hair is not an option except for two emoji specifically designed to represent elderly people—a bald man and a woman with her hair in a bun. Those who go gray while they’re still young are out of luck.
I’m also a little annoyed that for emoji representing standing female couples, one gets a choice of two women in dresses or two women in what seem to be Playboy Bunny outfits—leotards and ears. Can’t we have one where they’re both wearing pants? And what’s with the Bunnies, anyway? Seems like a company aiming for diversity would stay away from something that evokes objectification of women.
I’m kvetching here, so I do want to say that I’m pleased Apple has gone as far as it has. Multiple skin tones and same-sex families are a great step in the right direction. Default yellow for couples and families is a simple solution that, while not as individualized as we might hope, at least doesn’t exclude anyone.
Nevertheless, there’s always room for improvement, and technology continues to evolve. Surely, if Apple can give space in its apps to emojis of canteloupes, slot machines, and ancient 3 1/2-inch floppy disks, it could offer up some more space for more human inclusion in a future update.
