Emoji 12.0 brings us waffles, more diversity, suggestive "finger pinch" glyph
There's a push for more diversity with this new emoji release. We have emojis for deaf people in three genders (male, female, and genderless) and five skin tones, an ear with a hearing aid, people in motorized and unmotorized wheelchairs, prosthetic arms and legs, a guide dog and a service dog, and people with a probing cane. There are actually only 59 distinct new emoji types in this release, but everything that depicts a human comes in five skin tones and three genders, which pumps up the numbers. You can really see this with the "People holding hands" emoji, which is completely configurable for a total of 70 possible combinations.
The emoji that's causing the most buzz is "pinching hand." Emojipedia's example shows a thumb and pointer finger with a small distance between them, which could also be interpreted as a hand signal for "small." People are already coming up with, uh, "suggestive" uses for such a glyph, and if the actual implementations follow Emojipedia's design, the glyph could end up on the naughty list next to peach and eggplant.
Thank you, Emojesus. ✝
By the way, what happened to calling it Unicode 12.0? Maybe they'll call it that in June.
Unicode Consortium blog post. Also at Emojipedia and 9to5Mac.
Previously: 38 New Emojis to be Introduced in 2016
Unicode Considering 67 New Emoji for 2016
Unicode 9.0 Serves up Bacon Emoji, 71 others, and Six New Scripts
Unicode 10.0's New Emojis
Stink Over Frowning Poo Emoji at the Unicode Consortium
Related: Apple's New iPhone X will let You Control the Poo Emoji with Your Face
Google CEO Drops Everything to Fix Cheeseburger Emoji
Microsoft Briefly Left Holding the Gun Emoji
Battle of the Bagel Emoji
(Score: 2) by rigrig on Thursday February 07 2019, @10:55PM
TFA is wrong, there are 70 new combinations, "women holding hands", "woman and man holding hands" and "men holding hands" already exist.
And to complicate things:
* You get "persons holding hands", or "[woman/man] and [woman/man] holding hands", bot not "person and woman..." or "person and man..."
* You only get "woman and man...", not "man and woman..."
* You get either no skin colors at all (i.e. smiley-yellow), or a color for both persons
* For "[persons/women/men] holding hands" you only get one variant of every skin color combination, but for "woman and man..." you get both light-dark and dark-light
Presumably vendors will implement the missing mirror variants anyway by flipping the image.
So it might make sense if your software just works for any case of [person/man/woman]{color}[handshake][person/man/woman]{color}
No one remembers the singer.