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Zombies, hijabs, breast-feeding woman are upcoming emojis

ASSOCIATED PRESS / 2016

In honor of World Emoji Day, Apple has shared a preview of 12 of its newest emojis.

Do we really need an emoji for throwing up? Whether we do or not, we’re getting one.

In honor of World Emoji Day (yes, it exists, and it was today), Apple — whose colorful and increasingly detailed palette of emojis have to some degree altered the way humans communicate — has shared a preview of 12 of its newest emojis. They include a woman with a headscarf, a breast-feeding woman, a vomiting emoji, a zombie and a sandwich (finally).

The full set will be released this year with updates for various Apple operating systems.

Apple has steadily moved toward inclusivity and diversity in its emojis, enabling users in 2015 to change the skin tone of most of the “human” emojis. The headscarf and breast-feeding emojis seem to be in line with this trend.

The Unicode Consortium, a nonprofit entity charged with deciding which emojis will populate our phones, has a robust selection process that might surprise some users. The top factor is whether an emoji is needed for compatibility with high-use emojis in other platforms like Snapchat or Twitter.

Another major factor is the emoji’s expected usage level; it needs to be high worldwide or within a particular community of users. That is most likely one inspiration behind the hijab emoji, along with the efforts of a 15-year-old Saudi girl, Rayouf Alhumedhi. Her effort was supported by Alexis Ohanian, a Reddit co-founder.

Rayouf submitted an emoji proposal to the consortium. Yes, anyone can submit an emoji proposal, and how often a particular emoji is requested is important to the consortium.

AJ+, Al-Jazeera Media Network’s current events channel, posted a video of Rayouf on Twitter. In it, she explains why this emoji needed to exist.

“Millions of women wear a headscarf, and not just Muslim women,” she said, also mentioning that an emoji of a man in a turban exists.

Not surprisingly, the headscarf emoji has also drawn its share of negative reaction on social media.

As of June, there were 2,666 emojis in the Unicode Standard.

So if you are bearded, wear a hijab or are feeling squeamish, fear not: You’ll soon get your emoji.

© 2017 The New York Times Company

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