I'm not advocating a world where each system randomly assigns skin tones to inanimate objects, but it could be done which is the point of this post. Other platforms such as Facebook, Twitter and Windows still support this. ? Horse Racing previously supported skin tones on iOS, but this was removed in iOS 9.3. None of these are recommended for modification by Unicode, nor is skin tone modification supported on platforms other than Windows for these emojis. Some systems already do support modifiers in non-standard ways.įor instance Windows 10 supports modification of the following emojis which aren't considered "bases" for modification in Unicode documentation: This is frequently suggested with examples such as varying shades of wine (red wine, white wine) or beer (light beer, dark beer).Ībove: Modifiers for wine? Image: Brandfire via Mashable. If you wanted to make various shades of each emoji, it could be done with modifiers. The technology for skin tone modification isn't actually restricted to the approved set of characters. Here on my Mac, italic does slant an emoji but bold does nothing:īold could be used to make the colors stronger, thicker lines in the artwork, something else? Just shooting some ideas here. Making an emoji bold does nothing on most (all?) systems right now.
With a little bit of imagination, here's some fun emoji ideas that vendors could implement today using existing Unicode functionality. Being part of Unicode, emoji characters are very flexible.