Historically the original emojis were ascii so the symbol had the color of text on the electronic device where typed
:-)
¯_(ツ)_/¯
:(
And so on
Comment on Is there any significance to people using emojis that match their skin tone?
blusterydayve26@midwest.social 5 months ago
Yellow was a late neutral addition to emojis that matched with the yellow smiley face that French Asshole keeps charging people for. The original emojis were white before the yellow and darker tones were added in 2015.
Look up Katrina Parrott for the backstory.
loomi@lemmy.world 5 months ago
lorty@lemmy.ml 5 months ago
Those were called emoticons back in the day.
loomi@lemmy.world 5 months ago
Same same
emoji became a thing because the Japanese wanted pictures aka kanji style representation of the ascii expressions. In any regards OG skin tone was average Japanese
loomi@lemmy.world 5 months ago
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.
blusterydayve26@midwest.social 5 months ago
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.
Tippon@lemmy.dbzer0.com 5 months ago
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
Image