Young designers are pushing new emojis with dark, curly hair

London – There are nearly 4,000 emojis to help people express themselves online, but a group of young design students in London say none of them include black or mixed-race hairstyles, and they're determined to change that.

“As a black person who lies and changes their hair, this campaign is very personal to me,” said Olivia Mushigo, senior founder of the Rise.365 team.

A group of London teenagers set out to shake up ideas of beauty with the first ever emojis featuring afros, braids, cornrows and locs.

“I feel like there's a misconception about coarse hair texture, among Afro hair,” says project designer Jayzik Duckoo.

Team member Chavez agreed, adding, “especially in a school environment, things like people wanting to touch your hair, talking about your hair – it will make you feel like you don't belong.”

Students began sketching styles – expressing how they would like to be seen in the digital space in order to counter the “text,” a form of discrimination that sees afro hair as useless, unattractive or dirty.

“There were so many different designs, it was hard to narrow it down to just four,” says Mishigo, “because Black and mixed hair are so different.”

It's hard work, but Duckoo said the creative process — designing the emojis, “was really fun… it was fun to see how it turned out.”

Emojis were first created in Japan in the 1990s. The advent of smart phones and the rise of text messaging has led to an increase in their use around the world over the past two decades, and it's not the first time there's been a push to make emojis more inclusive. In 2015, Apple has created 300 new emojisothers highlight different races and occupations, responding to consumer backlash.

The London group's four new designs will be submitted in April to Unicode, the California-based organization that approves or rejects all new emoji.

“There's a lot of history behind our hair,” said Joyclen Brodie-Mends Buffong, founder of the public interest company Rise.365, which is running the project. “We spend a lot of time doing our hair, so for us it's important that we want to look good.”

Rise.365 asked others to help promote their cause by searching for “Afro hair emoji” on social media and search engines, in order to develop data about the question, which will help their bidding when they submit their proposed emojis in the spring.

For now, they can only wait, and hope that their creative and inclusive emojis will make the cut.