Black and Asian emoji coming soon? Black, Asian and other skintones could be introduced in the next emoji update thanks to the development of a wider range of skin tone shades. The Unicode Consortium, which ensures emojis are rendered and read by software correctly, has proposed that new skin tones be made available in order to work towards greater diversity. "People all over the world want to have emoji that reflect more human diversity, especially for skin tone," the report's authors Mark Davis and Peter Edberg wrote. The Unicode emoji characters for people and body parts are meant to be generic, yet following the precedents set by the original Japanese carrier images, they are often shown with a light skin tone instead of a more generic (inhuman) appearance, such as a yellow/orange colour or a silhouette. The report proposes the addition of five symbol modifier characters that provide for a range of skin tones for human emoji in a Unicode Version 8.0 update, based on the six tones of the Fitzpatrick scale, a dermatological standard. Developed for use in Japanese SMS messages, emoji have become enormously popular for peppering texts, tweets and other messages with colourful icons, which depict wide range of emotions, food and animals. The Consortium has previously addressed the lack of black or other ethnically-diverse emoji "in response to concerns," and said it was working on proposals to provide more diversity. "Of course, there are many other types of diversity in human appearance besides different skin tones: Different hair styles and colour, use of eyeglasses, various kinds of facial hair, different body shapes, different headwear, and so on," the report added. It is beyond the scope of Unicode to provide an encoding-based mechanism for representing every aspect of human appearance diversity that emoji users might want to indicate. Current emoji: soon to be more diverse?