Facebook unveils new family emoji with different skin tones

PanARMENIAN.Net - Facebook on Wednesday, August 25 rolled out a set of new “family” emoji that, while they don’t yet capture the full spectrum, at least let your partner and kids have something other than yellow skin, TechCrunch says.

It’s live right now in the desktop and mobile site — but not Messenger, which for some reason uses different emoji, or the mobile app. All you have to do is pull down the emoji menu, then do a long click on the family emoji — your options should appear above the default yellow-skinned emoji.

However, diversity is complicated. Families frequently aren’t all black, all brown, or all yellow. Reflecting real diversity in families is different from doing so with individuals. And the encoding process is different, too.

Families aren’t so easily encoded, so to speak. What if you have an hispanic man who has married a black woman, and they have a son with lighter skin and a daughter who favors her mother? Turns out there are 52,000 options for combining the different genders and colors, TechCrunch says.