Tuesday, September 13, 2016

"Meet The 15-Year-Old Behind The Proposed Hijab Emoji"

BF:
Her friends decided to title the group chat by using an emoji that represented each of their faces. Her friends picked their hair and skin colors and created a cartoonish likeness of themselves. For Alhumedhi, who wears a hijab headscarf, this wasn’t so easy. Though emoji has options for turbans, detective fedoras, police officer caps, and jolly red santa hats, there’s no option for the traditional headscarf worn by 550 million Muslim women, alone.

So Alhumedhi took matters into her own hands.

Unsure of what to do, Alhumedhi wrote a long email to Apple’s customer help but didn’t hear back. A few months later, though, she stumbled on a Mashable explainer about the Unicode Consortium, the technical organization that governs the evolution of emoji and handles new proposals.