The Winding, Heated, And Absurdly Technical Oral History Of The Ginger Emoji

In November 2014, a tech-industry consortium announced a new set of emoji that would diversify the physical appearance of the pictograms.

EMMA KELLY, editor and founder of the site Ginger Parrot: I checked and saw that redheads were just not on there. I wondered, has no one brought this up? Is there no one at Apple with red hair? Has everyone forgotten about Ed Sheeran?

- Gregory Mone

Kelly fired offa post on her blog, launched a petition on change.org, and fed quotes to The Guardian and other media outlets. But she soon discovered it would take much more than an online protest to get her way.

Emoji are subject to a complex technical bureaucracy. The type and number of new pictograms released each year are strictly controlled by the Unicode Consortium, an international nonprofit organization of companies—including, most notably, representatives from Apple, Google, Microsoft, and Adobe. Unicode’s core mission is to convert the world’s alphabets and symbols into code that all smartphones, desktops, laptops, and computers can read. The dollar sign, no matter the phone or font, is U+0024. The taco: U+1F32E. Websites, email clients, word processors, and other interfaces then transform that code into words and icons—and vice versa.

For most of its 27-year history, Unicode was concerned with simple characters—musical and mathematical notations, currency signs, punctuation marks. Starting a decade ago, this group of accomplished linguists, font designers, and software developers began including the smileys that had become popular across several Japanese telecom companies. Thereafter, these technical overlords were tasked with debating such matters as the prevalence of unicorns and the cultural import of a pile of poop. A deeper look at Kelly’s campaign for ginger representation reveals that they do not accept their responsibility blithely.

CHAPTER ONE

Adopting pixelated cuteness

Emoji began in 1999 in Japan, a country with a long history of pictographic language. In 2007, Unicode members started seriously debating how to include stylized picture characters to make it easier to exchange them across platforms. By 2010, the updated Unicode standard, version 6.0, had some 722 emoji.