Emojis, a small image used to express emotions or ideas, are present in people’s everyday lives. Whether they are used to express joy and excitement or sadness and anger, there are hundreds of emojis to choose from. Some emojis even have hidden meanings when put in a sequence.
These emojis have become very inclusive over the years. Some emojis depict people and professions. These emojis offer a wide variety of hair colors and skin types in order to properly represent everyone. Although many hair colors and skin types are represented, there seems to be one very important group of people not included. Those with red hair don’t get to be a part of this emoji fun. If you have red hair, there is only one emoji you can use: .
When questioned about her feelings on the limited variety of emojis, Claire Behnke ’28 (who has red hair) expressed, “It hurts my feelings. It makes me feel unseen. This is gingerism at its finest.”
Unicode, a software that creates these emojis for all platforms, has made no effort to create more ginger emojis, but there may still be hope. Recently, Apple has introduced a new form of technology called Genmoji, a platform that will appear on the iPhone keyboard. With the power of AI, users will be able to create an emoji of their choosing by entering keywords. This will allow users to create more ginger emojis and express creativity. The world of emojis is unlimited— with new technology, anything is possible.