back to article You have suffered without red-headed emoji for too long. That changes Tuesday

Brace yourself, world: the Unicode Consortium unleashes version 11.0 of its Emoji and general standard on Tuesday June 5th, and will right the terrible wrong that is the absence of red-headed emoji. Emoji 11.0 of Unicode’s eponymous standard will also add curly hair, white hair and bald heads. Those additions, and red hair, …

  1. ratfox
    Headmaster

    I demand moustaches and beards!

    How can I properly express myself without handlebars on my emojis??

    1. teknopaul

      Re: I demand moustaches and beards!

      Go old school

      :{

    2. find users who cut cat tail

      Re: I demand moustaches and beards!

      U+1F9D4 ?

  2. brotherelf
    Coat

    Seems kinda hard to implement…

    I like how the reference picture shown for "smiling face with three hearts" shows four hearts.

    1. Paul Kinsler

      Re: the reference picture shown for "smiling face with three hearts"

      Fortunately, in the linked pdf, the reference picture does only have three hearts.

  3. Mark 85

    I guess more emojis are needed because people can't write anymore? Pretty soon they're will probably be a Twitter for just emojis and no text.

    1. Anonymous Coward
      Anonymous Coward

      Remember that Idiocracy movie scene in the hospital, that emoji keyboard at the information counter?

      We're getting there, eventually.

    2. quxinot
      Joke

      >I guess more emojis are needed because people can't write anymore? Pretty soon they're will probably be a Twitter for just emojis and no text.<

      It worked for the Egyptians for a good long while!

    3. Bill Michaelson

      Who needs 280 characters...

      ...when you've got hieroglyphics?

    4. Pat Harkin

      And perhaps even a movie! That'd be GREAT!

  4. Anonymous Coward
    Anonymous Coward

    It is getting kind of ridiculous

    Pretty soon we'll see albinos demand an emoji, then people with limbs missing, there are an infinite number of emojis if you try to represent everyone.

    They should have just made all the human emojis green with purple hair, so no one could feel discriminated against.

    1. Anonymous Coward
      Trollface

      Re: It is getting kind of ridiculous

      I dont know, out of the '60' genders that apparently exist in current year, at least one of them will be offended by it.

    2. Daniel Hill

      Re: It is getting kind of ridiculous

      "Pretty soon we'll see albinos demand an emoji"

      As a Reg reader with albinism, I'd quite like that!

      Will have to make to with 'White Hair + Light Skin Tone' for the moment I guess!

      Of course, composing messages with emojis is still a pain for those of us with low vision (result of the albinism), as Swifkey's emoji panel doesn't respond to triple-tap zoom on my Samsung Galaxy and I have to get a physical magnifier out to see what each of the little pictures actually is!

  5. Anonymous Coward
    Anonymous Coward

    isn't it better not to have a red headed emoji?

    1. Dan 55 Silver badge

      It's better not to have emojis...

      1. Anonymous Coward
        Anonymous Coward

        Back in the good old mobile phone days

        In the era of T9 predictive text input and sms messages, people were sending one another ascii art text messages, especially during birthdays and festive days.

        Emojis are the technological evolution, and condensation, of that.

        1. Dan 55 Silver badge

          Re: Back in the good old mobile phone days

          Wouldn't it be easier just to send Miis instead of reserving a unicode character for every combination of face, facial expression, facial features, and colour?

      2. Shadow Systems

        At Dan 55...

        I wish I could give you about a trillion more up votes.

        "A picture is worth a thousand words" is an utter lie to anyone whom can't see the picture in the first place. Eyesight going bad with age? Going or already blind? Kiss that fancy pictoglyph goodbye.

        I know it's mean, I know it's petty, but I wish all those emoji using wankers went blind for a week & were forced to use nothing but emoji the entire time. Let's see (HA!) how well they get along unable to write anything & a screen reader has nothing to read to them. I bet they change their tune after the ordeal.

        I know the kids like them, I'm sure they're fun & funny for those that can see them to enjoy such things, but *#)@!*#$%)^($!1!1!EleventyOneoneone I fucking HATE those things!

        I'll get my coat, I obviously need my dried frog pills in the pockets...

        1. brotherelf

          Re: At Dan 55...

          … and aspies. Don't forget the aspies. I can't tell a difference between all those vaguely smiling emojis that are 12x12 pixels. Oh, is that one cocking its left eyebrow, not the right one? Is that supposed to make a difference? Frankly, needs tooltips. Or else, where do I petition for a font that actually renders stuff as ":smile:", ":wink:", ":eggplant", ":poo:"?

          1. Shadow Systems

            At BrotherElf...

            I would love it if it actually read emoji/icons/pictures/etc as ":ants mobbing a picnic:" or ":a girl in a bikini about to strike a volley ball over the net:" style descriptive bits. My screen reader would have descriptive text to read to me & let me know what all the fuss is about. As it is there's nothing to read, the 'reader goes silent for a bit, & makes me wonder if it just shat itself over a bunch of control codes or something. I get to character step back over the silent part, hear it go silent over "a single character" (the emoji), & that's the only clue I get that my 'reader still works. It's not its fault that there's a *graphic* there it can't read, there's no text associated with it for it to read at all.

            Fuck emoji. Fuck 'em with a spinning angry porcupine.

            1. Arthur the cat Silver badge

              Re: At BrotherElf...

              Fuck emoji. Fuck 'em with a spinning angry porcupine.

              That's probably going to be in the next release.

            2. Anonymous Coward
              Anonymous Coward

              Re: At BrotherElf...

              @brotherElfConsider that truly excellent expletive borrowed.

              I love it!

        2. Mike 16

          Picture worth a thousand words

          A common lie told with a straight face, _or_ composed by someone who confuses "value" with "price".

          This was brought home to me by an author commenting on the impending release of his latest book. The file containing the image for cover art was _many_ times larger than the (SGML-ized for typesetting) text of the entire book. So I guess the publishing industry does indeed assume that people judge a book by its cover.

          (well aware that this will attract down votes, but I suspect I am not the only one who would prefer to skim the text transcription of an hour-long video rather than stare at the screen for an hour with no guarantee of payoff)

          1. Shadow Systems

            At Mike 16...

            I agree with the desire for a movie transcription. I hate having someone link to a Youtube clip & instruct "go to position $Time" to start watching a particular portion of it. There's no easy way for a screen reader to get the movie to navigate forward/back in the movie stream, meaning we just have to sit there counting silently to ourselves to try & figure out the right point. If we could get a transcription of the darned thing, especially with proper time codes, then we could just do a simple Control+F (Find) to jump to that bit of text & have our 'readers continue from there. No fuss, no muss, no sitting through 1H45M55S of a 2H movie just to hear some twit say "This is the part that goes BING!"... Uh huh, that was certainly worth the ~2Hours of my life I won't get back. *Grrrrrrr*

        3. Dave559 Silver badge

          Emoji and screen readers?

          @Shadow Systems: I had sort of wondered that myself. Emoji are “named” symbols/characters, in the same way that letters have names. I’m therefore wondering why screen readers don’t say out loud the descriptive names when they encounter an emoji (although I can tell that it could get quite long winded for some of them)?

  6. Anonymous South African Coward Bronze badge

    Any new poo emojis getting pushed out?

    1. Anonymous Coward
      Trollface

      Okay, you deserve a *You* for that!

      1. Anonymous Coward
        Anonymous Coward

        Just check the logs.

    2. Rameses Niblick the Third Kerplunk Kerplunk Whoops Where's My Thribble?

      "Any new poo emojis getting pushed out?"

      Could be a bit of a strain, that one.

      1. Anonymous Coward
        Anonymous Coward

        A bit of strain

        Once you get the hardened bit out of the way, the rest will be smooth flowing!

    3. no_handle_yet

      9 upvotes currently. I bet you feel flushed with success.

      1. Anonymous Coward
        Anonymous Coward

        Definitely a joke that will run and run

    4. Anonymous Coward
      Anonymous Coward

      New poo emojis

      Maybe new poo animojis, let's see what Apple dishes out later this year.

    5. Anonymous Coward
      Anonymous Coward

      There's a new one for constipation but it's hard to get out.

      1. Aladdin Sane

        Do what your teachers taught you and work it out with a pencil

        1. onefang

          "Do what your teachers taught you and work it out with a pencil"

          I tried something like that, ended up in hospital.

    6. Mark 85

      I thought that since emojis in general are a steaming pile that they were all poo.

  7. lglethal Silver badge
    Joke

    Wait a second

    A mayan numeral zero is an aussie rules football? Well i suppose you definitely cant get any work done when the footies on, so i guess it makes sense.

    (Insert rugby ball in place of aussie rules football if thats more your cup of tea, you'd be wrong of course, but you can still do it... )

  8. Michael Habel

    What, no quips about gingers?

    1. Kane
      Joke

      "What, no quips about gingers?"

      Only a ginger can call another ginger, ginger

      .

      .

      .

      .

      Fanta Pants

      1. Anonymous Coward
        Anonymous Coward

        Love that song - Prejudice!

    2. JohnBoyNC
      Coat

      Ginger emoji? Why now? Perhaps one of the gingers snapped.

      I'll grab my coat and hat on the way out..........

  9. Lee D Silver badge

    I find it quite disconcerting that it took just as long to integrate ancient Mayan numerals (which are pretty much one of the first examples of a written numeric system) as it did to put in a picture of Broccoli.

    I mean... seriously. Emojis, etc. - sure. But do the important things that are much closer to the purpose of Unicode first.

    No researcher out there is quietly crying out for a symbol of broccoli in their fonts in order to record, categorise and translate their ancient documentation.

  10. Destroy All Monsters Silver badge
    Paris Hilton

    So when do these things come to El Reg comment section?

    Completely unrelated, Mozilla Firefox "New Tab" tab asks me whether I might be a "web maker" and would I be interest in the basics.

    What is a "web maker"? Isn't that a spider?

    1. Woza

      Re: So when do these things come to El Reg comment section?

      Rather than bring them here, El Reg should lobby for emoji versions of the comment icons for use outside this forum.

  11. Anonymous Coward
    Anonymous Coward

    “Smiling Face With Smiling Eyes and Three Hearts”

    I assume taht a variant with two hearts is not available as that would infringe the BBC's Dr Who copyright!

  12. CT

    On the other hand...

    There are about half a dozen people absolutely ecstatic that

    "Intonation marks for Lithuanian dialectology"

    have finally been implemented, and they no longer have to take a biro to printouts and re-scan the results from a photo taken on a wooden table.

  13. TheProf
    Facepalm

    More???

    I can never find the right one now. I know I've seen it somewhere but after looking through the 8 pages of them my phone offers me I can't remember why I need it.

    I think I'll have a browse through the animated GIFS. There's bound to be one that expresses my exact thought.

    1. Swarthy

      Re: More???

      Well, animated GIFs do have a long tradition of expressing a precise meme-ing.

  14. Velv
    Headmaster

    I demand the El Reg icons being added to the next iteration. How can one possibly reply to comments properly without a pedant alert.

  15. katrinab Silver badge

    What about brown envelopes

    If the Chinese can get red envelopes, why can't we get brown ones? They have a very different meaning, so substituting a red one would not be appropriate.

  16. find users who cut cat tail

    Obligatory XKCD

    xkcd 1953

    1. This post has been deleted by its author

  17. handleoclast
    Thumb Up

    Excellent news!

    Since it will be a unicode combiner, red hair can be added to any emoji.

    So, finally, we'll be able to use a red-haired poo emoji.to represent Mark Zuckerberg, Chris Evans, etc.

    Good news, indeed.

  18. Anonymous Coward
    Anonymous Coward

    Full Circle

    In the beginning man drew figures on a cave wall. They gave a rough meaning to what was being described but no fine detail. Rush forward a few thousand years and an alphabet was invented. It enabled the user to construct words that mimicked speech. It became possible to state exactly what was meant. Progress. But even this lacked the ability to convey mood easily. It was possible but the writer needed to set the mood by choosing the words carefully. Writers were born. Fast forward to now. Some brain dead idiots decided to cut out the writing part so back we go to pictures. For the ignorant it was progress because there was no need to learn grammar or spelling, just stab away and you are golden. Rather than teaching the idiots the value of learning something valuable the world caves and sets mankind back to the dark ages. Welcome to the new millennium.

  19. Gene Cash Silver badge
    WTF?

    Nerd Face 1F913

    Is it just me, or does that look racist as fuck?

    1. Anonymous Coward
      Anonymous Coward

      Re: Nerd Face 1F913

      Just you.

  20. earl grey
    Paris Hilton

    1F984

    At last I get a unicorn!

    1. Anonymous South African Coward Bronze badge

      Re: 1F984

      Do the unicorn fart rainbows?

POST COMMENT House rules

Not a member of The Register? Create a new account here.

  • Enter your comment

  • Add an icon

Anonymous cowards cannot choose their icon