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Young Londoners push for world’s first Afro hair emojis
Aiming to break down beauty stereotypes and making the digital world more inclusive, a group of young students and professionals from London have designed what they hope will become the first ever emojis of Black and mixed-race hairstyles.
The project, a partnership between youth-led organisation RISE.365 and PR agency Good Relations, aims to tackle texturism, a form of discrimination where Afro hair is often perceived as “unprofessional”, “unattractive” or “unclean”.
There are nearly 4,000 emojis – symbols that represent human emotions or objects which are widely used in electronic messages – but none feature Black or mixed-race hairstyles. RISE.365 and Good Relations took matters into their own hands to change that.
A group of young people sketched what the emojis should look like, and then designers came up with the final product.
“It (emojis) would break down the society standards of your hair having to be straight to be seen as desirable,” said Jayzik Duckoo, a 17-year-old who worked on the initial drawing of one of the emojis. “I hope people wear their hair proudly.”
Four emojis were created featuring afros, braids, cornrows and locs. They will be submitted to Unicode, the California-based group responsible for emojis, in April 2025 for consideration.
Googling ‘Afro hair’ could help increase the chance of the emojis making the cut as one of the criteria when reviewing the submissions is frequency of use of the key term associated with the proposed symbols, RISE.365 said.
Olivia Mushigo was the senior creative behind the project, and said she hoped the emojis would make people “feel empowered and…actually seen”.
The 28-year-old shared, “On a more personal note, I finally have an emoji that looks like me, that I can identify with.”
A poll of RISE.365 members – a total of 104 respondents – showed 61% had experienced discrimination or bullying because of their hair. A 2023 study by the CROWN Research Studies showed 66% of Black women change their hair for a job interview.
Vanita Brown, who designed the emojis after consultation with the young people at RISE.365, said a reason why such emojis were still not available was due to Eurocentric beauty standards being seen as the norm.
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