A selection of Apple’s new racially diverse emoji. Photograph: Apple

Apple’s racially diverse emoji have landed, and they come in five shades of skin.

On Monday Apple released beta updates to its OS X operating system, including a redesigned emoji keyboard with long-awaited skin tone modifiers, as first reported in 9to5mac.

Complaints about the lack of racial diversity in the emoji characters impelled the Unicode Consortium, an industry body devoted to developing software standards, to add skin tone options. The tones are modelled on the Fitzpatrick scale, a recognised standard used by dermatologists.

Previously there were only three characters which appeared to represent non-western people: a man wearing a cossack hat, a man with brown skin wearing a turban, and another man wearing a traditional Chinese skull cap – with noticeably smaller and more slanted eyes.

Like all the human characters, these three male emojis now come in a generic bright yellow as the default option – which some media outlets have dubbed “jaundiced” but also recalls the skin colour used in The Simpsons – along with tone modifiers. Notably the character wearing a Chinese-style cap now has eyes the same size and shape as the others.

A selection of the new emoji, including the character with the Chinese-style cap whose eyes have been widened and some families with parents of the same gender, another new feature of the emoji. Photograph: Apple

Other additions include new same-sex relationship emojis, such as families with two mothers and two fathers. There will be 300 new emoji characters added altogether.

The updates are currently only available to testers but will have an official release at some point in the coming months.

Guardian Australia has contacted Unicode Consortium to ask when redheads will finally be given an emoji presence.