Here’s the multi-skin tone handshake emoji that could have arrived this year, now coming in 2022

Apple’s recent iOS 14.5 version for iPhone brought a whole lot of new emojis to express your feelings in more detail. The company added a total of 441 emojis in a single OS update. Google, Samsung, Facebook and others may also introduce some new ones soon this year. However, now, we have a look at our first major and potential emoji that could arrive in devices by next year - multi-skin tone handshake emojis.

Ever since both the tech giants Apple and Google have asked the Unicode Consortium to add more skin tones to existing emojis since 2014, we have been seeing several of them coming up with every major update. And this time the existing handshake emoji is getting this treatment.

For now, be it on WhatsApp, Facebook, Apple or anywhere else, you can see the handshake emoji only in yellow colour. However, new skin tones have now been submitted to the Unicode Consortium, wherein both hands can be of different skin tones as well.

This news came via Google’s blog post, citing Jennifer Daniel, Google’s creative director for emoji and a member of Unicode Technical Committee. It is said how she came up with 25 new variations of the handshake emoji with different skin tones. She said it was a long process since there wasn’t just one emoji to turn into a new colour. It required two hands, both of which had to be in different skin tones.

Jennifer had proposed the emoji in November 2019 with the expectation it would land on devices in 2021. However, the process got delayed by six months due to Covid-19 limitations. Now, it is expected to arrive in the next release, Emoji 14.0, in 2022.