From iPhone's to billiards everywhere, emoji's are here to stay. Glyphs are on the rise. Since they are so hip, let's see how they are standardized, if at all.
Right now, when computers display text, they almost always use Unicode. The Unicode Consortium (Unicode) aims to be able to represent *every* character or glyph made by humans. This includes Latin characters (the ones you are reading now) to Russian and Japanese characters. Since humans are now commonly communicating via emoji, they were added to [Unicode 7.0][unicode-7].
Standardizing emojis has some problems. One of the first problems is how do we ethically choose what the emojis look like? For example, by only choosing white toned emojis, the standard could exclude many of the world's inhabitants. This problem [has been pointed out by previous bloggers][neal].
The problem with emoji's looking different luckily does not seem to be too much of a problem. According to Unicode's [official documentation][unicode], there is no need to standardize emoji colors. From their FAQ, "Unicode does not require a particular racial or ethnic appearance—or for that matter, a particular hair style: bald or hirsute". Unicode even took the time to make sure that not even hair was discriminated against!
Another problem is, what glyphs are important enough to standardize? Including symbols such as smiles are general enough to include. However, what about the symbols that are so specific that it is hard to find a use for them? The strangest glyph I found were a symbol for Lilith (⚸), a hypothetical second moon of the Earth. I am in favor of diversity, but this celestial being **does not exist**, and never has. Why was this chosen over seemingly infinite other useful nouns? There have been a few times I have needed a toaster emoji, but was only able to talk to my friend about Lilith (sarcasm).
[neal]: http://stevensstandardsandsociety.blogspot.com/2014/11/unicode-emoji-diversity-problem.html "Neal Blog on Emoji"
[unicode]: http://www.unicode.org/faq/emoji_dingbats.html#2.4 "Emoji FAQ"
[unicode-7]: http://unicode-inc.blogspot.com/2014/10/unicode-version-70-complete-text-of.html "Unicode 7.0.0 announcement"
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