Emoji Skin Tones: Every Emoji in Every Shade

Why there are only five shades, and where they come from

The five tones are borrowed from dermatology. The Fitzpatrick scale, published by Thomas Fitzpatrick in 1975, sorts skin into six types by how it reacts to sunlight, and Unicode merged the two lightest types into one modifier. That decision dates from Unicode 8.0 in 2015, although Apple shipped the tones a couple of months earlier, in iOS 8.3 that April. Five steps is coarse, and it was a deliberate trade-off: every extra tone multiplies the number of images a phone has to carry, and the 2,040 versions that exist today already outnumber every other kind of emoji combined.

How a skin tone is stored, and what you see when it fails

👍🏽 is not a brown thumbs up stored as one character. It is the ordinary 👍 followed by the medium modifier 🏽, and your phone merges the two into one picture. When a device does not know the combination, it gives up on merging and shows both pieces side by side: a yellow thumbs up and a square of colour after it. That pairing is the giveaway that the sender used a tone your device cannot draw yet, usually because the emoji is newer than your software. Jobs and roles work the same way: 👩🏾‍💻 is a woman, a tone, an invisible joiner and a laptop, which is why 197 of the 332 emoji on this page are multi-part sequences.

Couples and handshakes got their tones years late

Giving one tone to one person is easy. Two people are harder, because each should get their own. 🤝 was added in 2016, but you could not give each hand its own tone until 2021, when Unicode added separate left and right hands to build it from. People holding hands got mixed tones in 2019, and kissing couples and couples with a heart followed in 2020. The longest wait ended in 2025, when Emoji 17.0 finally gave tones to the wrestlers and the bunny-ear pairs, emoji that had been yellow since 2016 or earlier. Pairs like these account for 415 of the skin tone versions, from just 19 emoji.

How to change your default skin tone

There is no system-wide setting on most devices, so the tone sticks per keyboard or per app. On iPhone and iPad, press and hold any emoji that has tones and pick one; the keyboard remembers that choice for that emoji only, so you set it once per emoji you use. Gboard on Android works the same way through a long press, and newer versions also let you set one default tone for every emoji at once. Samsung Keyboard also uses a press and hold. WhatsApp on iPhone uses the iPhone keyboard, while WhatsApp on Android has its own emoji panel where a press and hold brings up the shades. Slack and Discord each keep a separate preference: in both, open the emoji picker and use the hand button beside the search box. If you use several apps, expect to set it in each one.

Questions about emoji skin tones