7mo ago

Is there any significance to people using emojis that match their skin tone?

I'm asking because as a light-skinned male, I always use the standard Simpsons yellow. I don't really see other light-skinned people using an emoji that matches their skin tone, but often do see people of color use them. Maybe white people don't naturally realize a need to be explicit with emoji skin-tone or perhaps it's seen as implicitly identifying or requesting white privilege.

Is there a significance to using skin-tone emojis, and if so, what is it?
Assuming there might be a racial movement attached to the first question, how does my use of emojis, both Simpsons yellow and light-skin, interact with or contribute to that?

Note: I am an autistic white Latino-American cis-gendered man that aims to be socially just.

Autistic text stim: blekh 😝 blekh 😝 blekh 😝 blekh 😝 blekh 😝 !!

127 comments

Use what you want to. Let others use what they want to. Don't overthink it.
Some people are thrilled with the fact that they can make their little online avatar closer to their reality, others don't give a damn, because they don't want to define themselves by their virtual presence. At the end of the day, though, they're just pixels. What you say and how you treat people is much more important than whatever little +1 icon gets attached.
- Based
  
  Indeed

I can give you a real answer, because I asked my wife this exact question (she's black and uses the skin tone closest to hers, I'm white and also just use yellow ones). She said it's so rare to get to choose a digital representation that matches her skin tone that she just thinks it's fun to get to do it for once.
- Which is the same reason they make characters of different races, genders and sexualities in video games.
  And people complain about these things "being forced on them" obviously without realizing that all those minorities are typically not represented in media. It's such a minor thing that should be easy to ignore if it doesn't apply to you, but when it does apply, feels good to know that someone was thinking about representing someone like you.
- Does the skin tone modifier work on the peach emoji?
  
  fuck legit laughed out loud at this
- She said it’s so rare to get to choose a digital representation that matches her skin tone that she just thinks it’s fun to get to do it for once.
  awww, that sounds so cute

Everyone simply saw the yellow ones as neutral toned. It's a nice contrasting color to show the emotion and they have always done a good job representing everyone while serving their goal: to convey emotion in text.
The push for representation in emoji's always struck me as weird since they already represented everyone. I rarely see people using them who aren't a bit too focused on skin color in their day-to-day life.
- That, and I think they trace a direct lineage back to the original Harvey Ross Ball smiley face, which was also yellow.
  Me, I don't particularly care about matching emoji skintones to myself. Rather, I'm much more annoyed that I can't tune the 🏍️ emoji to match the color of my motorcycle. What a rip off.
  
  I don't feel represented. There isn't a badass chrome and black cruiser emoji that makes a loud-ass rumble when you open the message, so I'm stuck with the fast and quiet Supersport 🏍.
  
  Similarly, there's no muscle car or hot hatch, just 🏎️🚗
- Everyone simply saw the yellow ones as neutral toned.
  I use those ones because they're closer to the top of the list, therefore faster to scroll to when I'm choosing an emoji.
- ...since they already represented everyone.
  Did they really? Because if that were the case we wouldn't have different skin tones for emojis with people claiming they feel more represented by them or happy to use them because they have the same skin tone.
  
  Yes, they did. The Canadian flag represents all Canadians. The BC province flag may represent me more closely, but it doesn't stop the Canada flag from doing the same. While some people will be happy they can represent themselves more accurately to real life, it also makes for more exclusive use cases. I think there's an argument to be made for keeping things simple and broadly usable.

There's no significance because they are just fucking emojis.
Simpsons yellow
:D

The yellow should be the only one. I find it absolutely idiotic that they needed to include all different skin colors. I think that's similar to my native language (Finnish) not having gender specific pronouns (hän = he/she) and then someone wanting to come up with ones. That's "fixing" a problem that didn't even exist in the first place.
- Maybe you'd feel differently if your country wasn't 90+% homogeneous with a light skin tone
  
  There are no yellow skinned people where I live
- I feel this is like saying the Simpsons, and most of Springfield, aren't supposed to be white because their skin is yellow.
  It's no surprise the default emoji color is so close to white skin, and it's no surprise that some people feel a lack of representation by this.
  
  But emoji's are not derived from the Simpsons. They're derived from the yellow smiley face ideogram that originated in the 1960s, it was designed by the artist Harvey Ball.
  It's yellow, not because it's supposed to represent whiteness, but because the company colors of the State Mutual Life Assurance Company it was designed for were yellow and black, and because it feels sunny, bright and positive. It's an anthropomorphized representation of the Sun, and does not represent a human with a specific skin color.
  
  interestingly, according to one study im half-remembering, people from countries with an ethnic majority see the Simpsons as part of their ethnicity. ie Asian people perceive The Simpsons as Asian.
- I really don’t care what colours of emojis exist. Use them or don’t use them, it’s not that deep.
  Actually spending time thinking about coloured emojis is a little strange to me. If someone wants to use a black one, white one, or yellow one just let it be.
  You sound like the kind of people that would have proclaimed it’s idiotic to give women rights, or let them vote, or give LGBTQ+ people rights of marriage or whatever. Change is inevitable and just because something has no bearing on your life doesn’t mean it has no bearing on anybodies life.
  
  You sound like the kind of people that would have proclaimed it’s idiotic to give women rights, or let them vote, or give LGBTQ+ people rights of marriage or whatever.
  You're insane.

I kinda like using emoji that are similar to my skintone. Not really making a statement, but somehow it feels a little more "me." Hard to explain why it matters, it's not like I won't use the yellow ones if that's all they have. Just kinda like "hehe, that's a lil me in that message."

My immediate opinion upon skin tone emoji being introduced was the mildest frustration: we’d had unified emoji for all Homo sapiens!
Then after seeing someone use their own skin tone for an emoji, I realized… oh, dang. They can feel represented now, potentially in a way they did not before.
I use yellow 100%. But not bad folks have options.
One neat thing is on Slack you may be able to see a hint of your company’s vibrant diversity if folks are reacting with all colors of emoji. Admittedly it could also look a little cluttered though maybe they are grouping reactions by symbol now.
On a related note, I’ve seen two people with very light (though non-white) skin tones use significantly darker skin tone emoji. One of those times I brought it up with someone else and they’re like “yeah what’s with that?!” Self image or eyesight related perhaps…

I just use the yellow one as I feel like they already represent everyone. I would definitely not feel any better about using a white emoji, I'd just feel like a racist trying to convince people that I'm better. I also like the yellow ones as it makes the standard to be anonymous about your skin colour. Or you could just use the outlined one for everything 🫥. Also the hole emoji is awesome 🕳️
And that was a way longer ramble then I intended 😀
And finally, good by 🖐️🖐🏻🖐🏼🖐🏽🖐🏾🖐🏿
P.S. Typing them all out the yellow one is also by far the most readeble. The white ones work very good on the black background I'm viewing this on but they probably just blend in to the background if your using a light theme. Maybe we should just type out all the variants? 🤷🤷🏻🤷🏼🤷🏽🤷🏾🤷🏿🤷‍♀️🤷🏻‍♀️🤷🏼‍♀️🤷🏽‍♀️🤷🏾‍♀️🤷🏿‍♀️🤷‍♂️🤷🏻‍♂️🤷🏼‍♂️🤷🏽‍♂️🤷🏾‍♂️🤷🏿‍♂️
- I'm a guy and default to use the female 🤷most of the time because that's what my phone gives me on some apps
  
  I think that one 🤷 is meant to be gender neutral. 🤷‍♀️ & 🤷‍♂️ are less ambiguous.
  
  I honestly didn't know the emojis were gendered until now.
  
  cishet male, I use yellow for face emojis and yellow gender neutral people for physical language standins.
  I want to represent the mood, not myself.

Isn’t it weird that only the white people in The Simpsons are yellow? There’s other races that aren’t yellow. And the Simpson’s world mirrors the real word; a large number of yellow people migrated from Eastern Europe to settle in Springfield.
I guess it’s better than the Doug universe, with people being either Caucasian or blue or purple. Very weird choice of representation, Nickelodeon! 👀
- Matt Groening said he made the characters in the Simpsons yellow with oddly colored hair so that people would be confused by the colors and try to adjust the knobs on their TVs to fix it only to never get it quite right.
- Wait until you hear about Sesame street!
- Didn't doug have a green dude too? And he was supposed to be white?
- #Simpsonsdidit

White dude here. I use the white skin emojis, but honestly I think it's just because I see my black and brown friends use their skin tones as a rule, and I feel like using the yellow tone is a bit weird when others are using the skin tone customization.
I'm not ashamed of my skin color or anything and the phone remembers my last tone selection so I don't really see a reason to not use it.

There's at least two things going on here:
A) a very mild case of the "white as default" part of white privilege. White people see themselves as default and use the default emoji.
2] the (often accurate) perception that white people who highlight their race unnecessarily do so out of racial pride, making self-use of a "white" emoji suspect.
I'm not saying these are the only two things at play, just the ones that occurr to me on first examinstion.
- Ugh. What a load of horse shit. 1) People are lazy, 2) often don’t realize that they /can/ change them, 3) care to.
  
  Then what is your explanation for black and brown people more likely to use the skin toned emojis, as has been mentioned so much in this thread? Are they less lazy than white people, or care more about it? If they care more about it, then why?
  
  All true as well!

All my emojis have jaundice

The original emojis were white before the yellow and darker tones were added in 2015. Look up Katrina Parrott for the backstory. In short, before yellow was the default, White was the only option, and that’s kinda racist, and was only 9 years ago.
Yellow was simply a neutral addition to emojis that matched well with the existing yellow smiley face (which that French asshole keeps charging people for).
Thanks for questioning your assumptions. Further reading if you’re interested:
https://www.buzzfeednews.com/article/pranavdixit/katrina-parrott-skin-tone-emojis-patent-office-warren
https://duckduckgo.com/?q=parrot+skin+tone+emoji+&t=ffip&ia=web
- Emojis evolved from the smileys we had in the late 90s, which were mostly yellow, but could be in various colours, like red for the angry face. Those smileys evolved from the text versions like these :) or :D
- Also the first gen iPhone emoji were a Japanese add on pack, iirc a keyboard addition. I had to install this add on on my iphone3g while I lived in Japan. Those emoji had average Japanese skin which white people just assumed was white. Only after those optional emoji got popular did apple make it standard, android copied, then people got worried about range of skin tone seeing as the Unicode was a global standard.
  
  Thank you, I had no idea the first phone emoji characters were a third party add-on. That explains how they got there, since Apple is pretty notorious for not including people shaped things in their art.
- Historically the original emojis were ascii so the symbol had the color of text on the electronic device where typed
  :-)
  ¯_(ツ)_/¯
  :(
  And so on
  
  Those were called emoticons back in the day.

Emoji is a failed concept anyway, because what you send is not necessary what the recipient gets. Why the app developers don't get this, is one of the great mysteries of our century.
But when I do use them, I choose the yellow ones.
- I would agree that emoji have basically failed. They confuse communication rather than facilitate it.
  Why are there 😀 and 😃 ? "Grinning face" and "Grinning face with big eyes." Why? There are so many of them with subtle details like this that A. choosing between them is a bigger chore than it should be and B. they have to be rendered at such a high DPI that "bro just increase your font size" becomes the bullshit workaround everyone tells you to do. I can read the English text just fine, but on most screens emoji are indistinct blobs.
  Emoji are subject to all the variation that fonts are. You know how there are two lowercase "g" glyphs? There's the one you probably do when handwriting which is an O and a J, and then there's the loop over a loop that basically no one hand writes, it looks like the font Lemmy uses has that g. Well, emoji are like that. Like how they had to add "male dancer/female dancer" the the standard because Google rendered the "dancer" emoji as a lame disco man, Apple rendered it as a woman in a red dress.
  They don't get used the way we used to use emoticons. I don't see people say things like "I can't go to the park today ☹️ " I see people say "Hey guys 👬 I just got back from the store 🏪 with some groceries 🥫 and took a picture 📸 of my dog 🐕 " Which to me demonstrates a failure to grow past the Sesame Street book with 6 thick rigid pages reading level.
  Finally, there are so many symbols that have alternate meanings that you just have to know. Like you can send white or tan or brown faces, but all eggplants are purple and all peaches are pink.
  
  And yet eggplant and peach are obvious enough.
- But when I do use them, I choose the yellow ones.
  Scrutinizes profile pic emoji avatar
  
  That one is from The Stick of Truth character editor

I just use the white as fuck guy because he has a green shirt (at least, on Android anyway) and I like green. Me being white as fuck is just a coincidence. 🤷🏻‍♂️
- I'm on Android and that shirt is definitely blue 🤷🏻‍♀️
- 🤷🏻

I have a white friend that uses the dark brown emojis, which I'm kind of uncomfortable with. I think he thinks he's showing solidarity. To me it seems like blackfishing. I haven't put any more thought into it though, as it is a pretty minor thing in a world with much more important things to be concerned with.
- blackfishing
  Oh god please not another buzzword
  Stop before you wake the tabloids
- Blackfishing?
  I thought we already had a term for when someone takes on someone else's skin color something something cultural appropriation
  
  That's something different, and it's not a new term.

I dunno, I mean they do it with LEGO men now, but Simpsons or LEGO yellow skin only belongs on people so jaundiced that it's a miracle they're not dead. Same with the more feminine Lego women. What ever happened to that same stupid smile and just switch the hair piece? I mean if it makes you happy I guess, it ain't hurting nobody. I feel neither represented nor unrepresented by a cartoon yellow face. Maybe it's just because I'm white, I dunno. You do you I guess.

I'm pale and I use the pale emoji, feels more like me.
I never really used the yellow ones. 🤷🏼
- I use the one with my hair color. For things like thumbs up I stick with yellow

It’s about personal preference for sure. I tried to start using the “white” emojis and it just didn’t seem to matter. If I do use an emoji, I tend to default to the Simpsons yellow because it requires no extra effort. I don’t see a ton of people using the skin-tone emojis at all. I also have no issue with people using them much like pronouns in emails/profiles.
I’m also on iPhone so if I am going to extra mile I’ll just use my little sticker guy who better represents me in general.

I think the idea is that the default yellow is symbolic (with some "white people are the default" connotation) and now that you can choose the skin tone of your emojis, many people now select one that matches their skin tone.

I leave mine stock yellow, but it is kind of a cool thing when you see a bunch of different color emojis liking a post. Feels nice and diverse lol.

This is my favorite emoji 🖕🏻

In white as fuck ✌🏿
- Yes, officer, this comment right here
- 🫱🏻‍🫲🏿

I don't use emoji very much. The most I use is when I'm working and sometime asks me to take on a task in Slack. There is a thumbs up all emoji that is just the skin tone shifting to all the colors. I like it because then I don't have to give a fuck about it.

Is it considered poor taste to use darker emoji colors if you are white?
- Like emoji blackface?
  In one app I'm a girl with medium skin tone and dark hair. In another I'm a pale boy with red blond hair. No idea how either one was chosen.
- Intentions matter in these questions. You'll know it when you see it if it is in bad taste.
- Only if you are using them to convey some kind of racist message or pretending to be someone of color.
- Without necessarily offering an opinion myself, there’s absolutely a chance someone views it as being in poor taste, thus at the least I would avoid doing it outside of conversations with those you know well.
- Other responses are kind of fence-sitting so I'm gonna go out on a limb here and say yeah it's poor taste, but forgiveable. I think it just boils down to why would you use a skin tone that's not yours? Some people like having an emoji that's they share with others of their color, so why intrude on that?

What do you mean with autistic text stim?
- It's some tiktok cringe thing about autism being a quirky and fun trait instead of a challenging mental disorder.
- I was feeling a bit uncomfortable with asking about this topic because I was worried that I would inadvertently be offensive somehow, so I typed my actual verbal stim into the post. Making weird noises when I'm overwhelmed is a way for me to get the energy out sometimes.

This came up in an anti-racism group I belonged to many years ago, where I learned to try to be aware of my acceptance of whiteness as "default" or somehow raceless. I also learned not to jump in and center myself in conversations about how race is (or worse, should be) perceived by those negatively affected or sensitive to it—or at least I thought I learned that, but here I am about to press send.
I came away from that conversation with an understanding that while I may feel that my race is immaterial to my identity and my point of view, it is nonetheless a real component of the context of my attitudes and online presence, so it's valuable to ask if there's a reason I'd want to hide it.

Most white people expect peach color/white to be the universally accepted default and everyone should just not think about it because they themselves rarely have to think about representation.
White people in majority white countries rarely experience lack of representation so they don't think its a big deal.
If medium brown was the default lots of people would be losing their minds with rage and y'all know it.
- The emoji standard is bright yellow though, not peach or white.
  
  Universally accepted default for drawn or animated people in general, not emojis. Simpsons yellow is what they use for white people.
  
  That's not the point of the comment, and not even what they said
- What white. Default is yellow.
  
  White/peach is the universally accepted default for drawn or animated people in general, not emojis. Simpsons yellow is what they use for white people. It's still using white person color for the default.
  
  Simpsons yellow. Not white?

I am caucasian, get sun burnt easily… I left the emojis (faces) its Simpson color (are there other?) but hands… I cannot stand the cirrhotic yellow hands/arms, and need to switch their color at first occasion… I also tend to select black hair people though I am slightly brown… and many caucasian friends of mine use black hands… so I would say that in my environment your hypothesis is rather a background underfluctuation than a potential valid one…

Eh, I don't really mind. I feel like I only use like... ❤️ and 🏳️‍🌈 though.

127 comments