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BY JUNE THIS YEAR, YOU CAN USE 77 NEW EMOJIS INCLUDING THE PESKY MOSQUITO AND A BALD HEAD

By June, you can use 77 new emojis including the pesky mosquito and a bald head |

Redheads and curlyhaired people, the Unicode Consortium has heard your pleas.

Those are just a couple of the 77 new characters approved to be added to Unicode’s next emoji update — 157 new characters if you count the variations in skin tones.

Bald people and people with white hair are the other new hair options. Jeremy Burge, the founder of Emojipedia and a member of the Unicode Consortium — the lowkey organisation that approves and encodes emojis — said red hair and curly hair were the most requested new emojis.

Like other “people” emojis, they’re available as men and women, and in a variety of skin tones.

Here are some you-ought-toknow-by-now things about emojis.

When was the emoji born?

In 1999. Emoji — cute pictograms that add emotional nuances to emails, texts and chats — have become something of a universal language. Back then, there were only 176; now, there are more than 2,600. They run the gamut of human experience, from joy and confusion to snowmen and witchcraft.

Who created the emoji?

Emoji had been created by Japanese mobile phone companies, who competed with each other to give their users more and better symbols to cheer up their text messages.

Then what happened?

A Californian nonprofit organisation called the Unicode Consortium was thrust by the emoji’s unexpected popularity, into the role as arbiter of these contemporary hieroglyphics. Set up in 1991, Unicode’s original purpose was to help bring order to the digital babel that emerged after the dawn of the world wide web. Back then, computers in different countries often used the same unique ID number to specify different characters in different alphabets, so an email sent in Hindi might come out on a Russian machine as a nonsensical jumble of Cyrillic. Unicode solved this by using up to a million IDs, making room for Bengali, Cherokee, Braille and the International Phonetic Alphabet. And for the next 15 years, expanding this library was the consortium’s primary task. Then, in the late Noughties, a fateful decision was made to incorporate emoji into Unicode. It soon became clear that, to meet the public demand, new emojis would constantly be in demand — and that the possibilities would be infinite. To ensure the emoji alphabet was manageable, and with a one-in-one-out policy considered impractical, the Consortium opted for a robust selection process.

What does ‘emoji’ mean?

The word “emoji” has nothing to do with emotions — it simply combines the Japanese words for “picture” and “character”.

How many emojis are in use today?

By June, 2018, 2,700 emojis will be out there. In 2017, more than five billion emoji were used on Facebook Messenger each day.

Can I submit my emoji idea to Unicode?

Anyone can submit a new emoji to the Unicode Emoji Consortium. The Unicode Emoji Committee, formed in 2015, is a small group that meets twice a week to debate whether “milk” should be depicted in a carton or a bottle, and whether bread should appear sliced. The best proposals are sent to another committee, meeting four times a year, for final approval. But the procedure is not simple. First, you need to be aware of the ground rules. An emoji should not represent a specific person, living or dead. There must be no trademarks, no deities, and no swastikas. You will need to prove that your emoji is distinct from an existing character; that there is a real appetite out there for it to be used; that it’s specific enough to be useful but vague enough to be universal. You also need to show it has longevity: the consortium frowns on fads. So if you want to convince the world it truly needs a pug emoji, or even a Sumerian diacritic mark, all you have to do is go before the elders of the Unicode Consortium and make your case.

Does the consortium always get it right?

Making these decisions has put the consortium in a difficult role. It has been accused of replicating sexist stereotypes by having

too many emoji of high heels and painted nails and not enough of women in professional roles. It has also added darker skin tones for the more realistic human emoji. The pistol sign has been so contentious that Apple renders it as a water pistol; the same company blocked the acceptance of a rifle emoji by threatening to bar it from its devices. “Unicode looks at emoji that can be used in more than one context” when deciding which proposals to approve, said Jeremy Burge, the founder of Emojipedia and a member of the Unicode Consortium. For instance, the salt shaker can be used for cooking, but also in terms of someone being “salty” — video game slang for being upset or bitter.

What are some examples of people’s emoji submissions?

Florie Hutchinson, a PR adviser in San Francisco, proposed a woman’s flat shoe, which is among the new symbols accepted. Another new symbol, the lobster, was the brainchild and relentless fixation of US senator Angus King, of Maine. The mosquito emoji proposal was created by global health advocates from the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation and the Johns Hopkins Centre for Communication Programmes.