The block was first proposed in 2008, and first implemented in Unicode version 6.0 (2010). The reason for its adoption was largely for compatibility with a de facto standard that had been established by the early 2000s by Japanese telephone carriers, encoded in unused ranges with lead bytes 0xF5 to 0xF9 of the Shift JIS standard.[6]KDDI has gone much further than this, and has introduced hundreds more in the space with lead bytes 0xF3 and 0xF4.[7]
face with "no good" gesture, with lower arms crossed, derived from the Japanese gesture for "no". Intended as gender-neutral but represented as a woman on most platforms.
1F646
🙆
face with "ok" gesture, described as a person with arms raised above the head forming a "circle", interpreted as "OK sign" (derived from the Japanese gesture for "OK"). Intended as gender-neutral but represented as a woman on most platforms.
1F647
🙇
person bowing (dogeza), depicted as a man on most platforms.
happy person raising one hand, a person raising one hand as if to answer a question, intended as gender-neutral but represented as a woman on most platforms.
1F64C
🙌
person raising both hands in celebration, on many platforms depicted as just the raised hands (Apple name: "Hands Raised in Celebration").
1F64D
🙍
person frowning
1F64E
🙎
person with pouting face
1F64F
🙏
person with folded hands (to indicate variously sorrow, regret, pleading, praying, bowing, thanking). In most platforms depicted as just the hand, pressed together but not folded (Apple name: "Hands Pressed Together").
The Miscellaneous Symbols and Pictographs block has 54 emoji that represent people or body parts.
A set of "Emoji modifiers" are defined for emojis that represent people or body parts. These are modifier characters intended to define the skin colour to be used for the emoji.
The draft document suggesting the introduction of this system for the representation of "human diversity" was submitted in 2015 by Mark Davis of Google and Peter Edberg of Apple Inc.[8]
Five symbol modifier characters were added with Unicode 8.0 to provide a range of skin tones for human emoji. These modifiers are called EMOJI MODIFIER FITZPATRICK TYPE-1-2, -3, -4, -5, and -6 (U+1F3FB–U+1F3FF): 🏻 🏼 🏽 🏾 🏿. They are based on the Fitzpatrick scale for classifying human skin color.
^"The default representation of these modifier characters when used alone is as a color swatch. Whenever one of these characters immediately follows certain characters (such as WOMAN), then a font should show the sequence as a single glyph corresponding to the image for the person(s) or body part with the specified skin tone" Draft Unicode Technical Report #51 "UNICODE EMOJI"Archived 2022-08-19 at the Wayback Machine Version 1.0 (draft 10) eds. Mark Davis (Google Inc.), Peter Edberg (Apple Inc.), 2015-05-08.
