Yon her first year of culinary school, 18-year-old Reanna Bryan was told her braided hairstyle wasn’t suitable for the kitchen. “I was like, ‘What do you mean you can’t have braids or dreadlocks?’ because this is what I use. “My hair is braided most of the time,” she says.
When she shared her experience with the young women’s circle of which she is a member in Upload.365a community support group based in Hackney, echoed similar stories.
“Straight hair is the norm,” she says, “and (afro hair) is just not represented.” This discussion led to the idea of a campaign to address an area of poor representation of afro hairstyles: emojis.
There is 3,790 emojisamong them mermaids, vampires and an afro comb, but none of them feature afro hairstyles that black people usually wear. “It’s sad and disappointing because it just shows how we (black people) aren’t seen in a lot of light, because you have a blonde girl or a redhead, and you don’t just have a plain girl with an afro and braids or something like that,” Bryan says.
For Amina Gray, youth mentor and Rise.365 facilitator, this is exactly why the campaign is important. “Black people, and women in particular, tend to have a lot of different hairstyles, but none of them are represented.
“We need to normalize that our hair, whether in its natural state or in a protective style, is acceptable… is professional.”
To address the imbalance, Bryan and other young members of the group were asked to design emojis with common hairstyles worn by black people. “I asked all of our youth to draw something that reflects them or an emoji they would like to see on the keyboard,” Gray says.
The group narrowed it down to the four they felt best reflected the variety of hairstyles in the community: cornrows, afros, locks and cornrows.
“I always wear braids so I thought ‘let’s do braids’ because obviously that represents me. It’s like a protective hairstyle and you can have it different ways: long, short, colored,” says Bryan.
Vanita Brown, junior designer at Good Relations PR, helped bring the sketches to life. “Most emojis tend to reflect the majority. “I feel like black and mixed-race hairstyles weren’t prioritized in the initial designs because the creators didn’t necessarily consider or prioritize the diversity of black hairstyles.”
Proposals for new emojis can be submitted to the Unicode Consortium, which sets standards for digital typography, but only a fraction is accepted for encoding. The group will present the designs in April.
In 2019, Rhianna Jones submitted an official afro hair emoji proposal with over 65,000 signatures from a online petition. However, it was refused based on the fact that the “curly hair emoji was designed to reflect a variety of hairstyles.” That year, submissions for bubble tea and the dotted line face were accepted and released as emojis.
Brown says Unicode relies heavily on input and feedback, such as how often shipping-related terms are used in Google searches, to make decisions about future emojis.
“That’s why we’re working with Rise.365 to gather enough support to encourage Unicode to add these new emojis. Every search (on Google) for the phrase ‘afro hair’ helps make these emojis a reality.”
The campaign is an opportunity to spark conversations about hair representation and discrimination more broadly, not just emojis, Gray says. “The four we have designed are just the beginning. (The campaign) is a teaching opportunity. I don’t want people to think that we only want emojis because we want to be represented that way. “It’s because there’s a much deeper message behind it, about empowering people and helping them realize that their hair is beautiful.”
Why is it important to Bryan? “My little brothers will be able to see an emoji that looks like them,” he says. “If this works, we will really change history.”