Facebook announced a big update to its Messenger app today, and it’s going to bring a whole lot of diversity to its emojis.
As part of the more than 1,500 newly designed emojis, users will get to choose from a range of skin tones, as well as a selection of professional women, and—praise be to Carrot Top, Lindsay Lohan, and most of my great aunts—redheads.
The new emojis will be standardized across every platform, which means no more mysterious black squares where your eggplant was supposed to be. Although some of the changes in question—like the option to customize skin color, which is line with a June 2015 Unicode update—have been available on iOS for some time, the new standardization means that no matter what platform you’re on, things will look the same.
Facebook is, however, adding some brand new faces. Five emojis—police officer, runner, pedestrian, surfer, and swimmer—will now appear as both male and female, a change that comes on the heels of a similar proposal from a team at Google, because it’s 2016, and women can do whatever they damn well please.
And though the new addition of redheaded emoji was relegated to a single sentence in Facebook’s blog post, the option is no doubt sending shockwaves through the redheaded community—myself included—which has long called for some ginger representation. Justice!
According to Facebook, the changes will begin rolling out globally tomorrow, so gear up for some pretty new faces in Facebook chat.