skin color palettes

[12Me21]

(not affiliated with twemoji, but i collected a bunch of data for a project i was working on recently)

Most emoji with skin color variants follow these palettes:

NOTE: a few of the existing SVGs have have colors which are off by 1 (e.g. ​#FFDB5E instead of #FFDC5D),

---

<?>

palettes

<?>

export default [
   { // 🧑👋 yellow skin (orange hair)
      skin1: '#FFDC5D',
      skin2: '#F9CA55',
      skin3: '#EF9645',
      skin4: '#EF9645',
      hair: '#FFAC33',
      eyes: '#662113',
      nose: '#C1694F',
   },
   { // 🧑🏻👋🏻 light skin (light black hair)
      skin1: '#F7DECE',
      skin2: '#EEC2AD',
      skin3: '#E0AA94',
      skin4: '#D89882',
      hair: '#292F33',
      eyes: '#662113',
      nose: '#C1694F',
   },
   { // 🧑🏼👋🏼 medium-light skin (yellow hair)
      skin1: '#F3D2A2',
      skin2: '#E2C196',
      skin3: '#D2A077',
      skin4: '#C68F6A',
      hair: '#FFE51E',
      eyes: '#662113',
      nose: '#C1694F',
   },
   { // 🧑🏽👋🏽 medium skin (red-brown hair)
      skin1: '#D5AB88',
      skin2: '#CC9B7A',
      skin3: '#B78B60',
      skin4: '#AA8052',
      hair: '#963B22',
      eyes: '#662113',
      nose: '#C1694F',
   },
   { // 🧑🏾👋🏾 medium-dark skin (brown hair)
      skin1: '#AF7E57',
      skin2: '#9B6A49',
      skin3: '#90603E',
      skin4: '#845636',
      hair: '#60352A',
      eyes: '#662113',
      nose: '#915A34',
   },
   { // 🧑🏿👋🏿 dark skin (dark black hair)
      skin1: '#7C533E',
      skin2: '#664131',
      skin3: '#583529',
      skin4: '#543226',
      hair: '#0B0200',
      eyes: '#000000',
      nose: '#3D2E24',
   },
]

<?>

---

• hair: hair color in human emojis (some use a fixed hair color instead, e.g. Older Person 🧓🧓🏻🧓🏼🧓🏽🧓🏾🧓🏿)

• skin1: main skin color

• skin2: darker shade, mostly used for shadows in human emoji

• skin3: even darker shade, mostly used for outlines in hand emoji

• skin4: darkest shade, very rarely used (Man Swimming, Nose, Woman Raising Hand, Baby, Middle Finger, Man Getting Haircut)

• nose: used for noses in human emoji

  • mouths are this color too, except female variants all use #DF1F32 👩👩🏻👩🏼👩🏽👩🏾👩🏿

• eyes: used for eyes in human emoji

[elephantpanda]

Just to put a spanner in the works. But everyone realises a Swede does not look like a Nigerian just with different colour skin right?

I mean there are other different facial characteristics that vary between population groups.

If we were to be entirely representative there would be different nose shapes for a start. As well as different hair textures. (Just having average sort-of-wavey hair for every human just isn't accurate).

An emoji with dark skin and straight/wavey hair can pass for a Southern Indian, for example, but doesn't look anything like a typical Kenyan, or Australian.

So really, we need at least 100 different emojis for all the ethnic groups and variations thereof.

[kkiris]

So really, we need at least 100 different emojis for all the ethnic groups and variations thereof.

This project is just one implementation of emoji that follows the Unicode standard. The skin color palettes here are Twemoji's implementation of the skin color modifiers encoded in Unicode, which are based on Fitzpatrick skin types. Comments on the limited number of emojis or what is/isn't included don't really belong here because the people working on Twemoji don't make decisions on what is in the Unicode standard.

[elephantpanda]

OK, just as long as we all know it's very very silly.