Everyone. Stop what you’re doing. We have an important redhead emoji update here!

Whether you signed our petition or simply jabbered on and on about the lack of ginger emojis to your mates, pat yourselves on the back because we are now significantly closer to having redhead emojis on Apple products.

Redhead emojis as imagined by Emojipedia

Today, Unicode released an important proposal detailing the technical implementation of redhead emojis, ripe and ready to be discussed at next week’s Unicode Technical Committee meeting, hosted by none other than Apple themselves.

The document begins: “Requests for representation of red hair in emoji have been ongoing…” Too right, it has!

Redhead emojis as imagined by Emojipedia

It goes on to outline the options for adding red hair into the current emoji keyboard. These include simply adding a standalone redhead in the same manner as the ‘person with blond hair emoji’ to be able to change the redhead’s skin colour, or another option is to rather trickily slot a new red hair modifier in within all of the existing emojis where hair/skin colour can be changed. The document outlines the pros and cons for each of the options, which are expected to be discussed next week.

Since then, we’ve reached over 20,000 signatures on our Change.org petition, have delivered the ‘carrot of justice‘ USB stick (containing the signatures) to Apple HQ, and we’ve waited. Patiently. Oh-so patiently, we have waited.

It goes without saying that we’ll be on the edge of our seats until we hear word following next week’s Unicode Technical Committee meeting. Think gingerful thoughts, dear redheads!

Find out more on Emojipedia or read Unicode’s ‘Summary of options for redhead emoji’ document.