Here are the new emojis coming to Facebook Messenger

One small step for digital equality: Facebook today announced that it will roll out a new set of emoji specifically designed for Messenger – including new skin tone and gender options.

Also, at launch, we have emojis representing red heads for the first time.

‘In other words, no more broken-looking black boxes or emojis that just don’t make sense’. They’re making it easy to find the right character with a new emoji picker to the left of the composer that lets users toggle between the regular text keyboard and the emoji one.

“Using emojis to communicate has become its own language really, so of course people want to extend that language and have more dialect”, said Jonas Downey, co-creator of Emojisaurus.com, a web site that provides emoji translations of popular phrases. Five emoji that have been traditionally displayed as men -the pedestrian, police officer, jogger, swimmer and surfer emoji – will all be female characters in the new set.

No matter what emoji you pick, it will now look the same for all Messenger users, regardless if the recipient is on Android, iOS or another platform.

It revealed almost 10% of mobile sends in Messenger include emojis.

Yet as emojis expanded beyond their original design as yellow or orange cartoon-like characters, their default was white and male. “Nor are they living up to the gender and skin tone diversity that we see in our world everyday”.