It’s been almost a year since emojis became available in multiple skin tones.

Since the change, more than just the Simpson-esque yellow skin shade has been available, which is fantastic.

But despite the positive move towards diversification, there’s one hitch: as the emojis’ skin gets darker, so does its hair, meaning they only currently range from blonde to black hair.

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Leaving behind one hair colour in particular: Ginger.


So quite rightly, redheads aren’t happy about this, and have been campaigning for a ginger emoji to be added to the collection.

An online petition has been organised in Scotland – which statistically has a higher number of redheads – and now has more than 20,000 signatures.

In Scotland, Wales and Ireland redheads make up around 10% of the population (Picture: Pexels)

Its Change.org page reads:



‘Despite the recent racial and sexual ‘diversification’ of Apple’s emoji to be released in the next iOS 8.3 update, there’s still an important group of people missing from the emoji family of 300 new symbols.

‘Redheads. In all their glorious gingerness, they’ve been missed out.

‘Again. If you say you’re going to diversify, why not add a few red-haired emoji in the mix?

Ginger emojis could come in all skin tones (Picture: Emojipedia)

‘Natural redheads may be rare at less than 2% of the world’s population, but that is 138,000,000 iPhones waiting [for it] to happen.’

And the increasing pressure to add a ginger emoji appears to have worked: next week, Apple is hosting a Unicode Technical Committee meeting on the matter.

It’s about time (Picture: Emojipedia)

‘The lack of a redhead emoji has been the most frequent complaint from users in the past three months,’ Jeremy Burge, founder of emoji website Emojipedia told The Telegraph.

‘This document aims to move the discussion forward on how this can be addressed,’ he added.

Burge himself presented the topic for discussion, and said that one option would be to have a single redhead person on the keyboard – allowing any of the emojis to have red hair.

For now, there still isn’t a ginger option.

But this could hopefully – especially after the Unicode meeting – be changing very soon.

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