Emojis have become one of the easiest and most accessible ways to express ourselves. And in an increasingly digital world, we’ve all come to identify with certain emojis more than others, based on which ones we feel represent the way we look or feel better. It’s no wonder then that the decision to add 56 new emojis to our keyboards in 2017, from unicode, the computing industry standard for encoding, has made a lot of people smile.Unicode has come up with new emojis that speak louder of a world where inclusion and equality will always be triumphant. Some of the emojis like a Hijabi women, a breastfeeding women, a bearded man, genderless adults and children amongst others have spurred a wave of excitement as it makes a lot of people feel more included and better represented.

Identity and faith have been the topics of many round table discussions, and what could be a better way them to embed them in our daily conversations. We are all unique and have our own quirks, hence having emojis that we can truly identify with to represent gender, race and religion is a welcome move for people across the globe.Emojis of food items like cut meat, coconut, Pretzels and canned food have amused foodies while emojis like an elf, a fairy, a genie and a Vampire will add a touch of magic to conversations. Even a person doing Yoga in the lotus position and a face vomiting have aroused animated reactions. The ideas for emojis were selected keeping in mind the proposals that came to Unicode from various people around the world and have been crafted due to popular demand.

Though the much celebrated ‘woman wearing a hijab’ emoji came as a result of 15-year-old student Riyadh-born Rayouf Alhumedhi, who proposed the new emoji sign with the explanation that, ‘roughly 550 million Muslim women on this earth pride themselves on wearing the hijab’ in a proposal she wrote to Unicode.

‘They’re really excited that this emoji will come to life because of me, their friend. I told my friends that, when it is on a keyboard, it will be the only emoji that we’ll be using,’ she added as per a report in Arab News. Hijabi women from the older to the younger generation are raving on twitter about having an emoji that they can use in their day to day conversations.

Given that we live in the age of digitalisation, where communication has moved beyond just words to pictures and emojis, we couldn’t be happier with this progression.

Feature Image Courtesy: news.fastcompany.com