Skin Tone Modifier

Technical/Unicode

Five Unicode modifier characters based on the Fitzpatrick scale that change the skin color of human emoji (U+1F3FB to U+1F3FF).

Introduced in Emoji 1.0 (Unicode 8.0, 2015), skin tone modifiers allow users to select from five skin tone options plus a default yellow. The modifiers are based on the Fitzpatrick dermatological scale:

- ๐Ÿป U+1F3FB โ€” Light skin tone (Type I-II)
- ๐Ÿผ U+1F3FC โ€” Medium-light skin tone (Type III)
- ๐Ÿฝ U+1F3FD โ€” Medium skin tone (Type IV)
- ๐Ÿพ U+1F3FE โ€” Medium-dark skin tone (Type V)
- ๐Ÿฟ U+1F3FF โ€” Dark skin tone (Type VI)

A skin tone modifier follows the base emoji character. For example, ๐Ÿ‘ (U+1F44D) + ๐Ÿฝ (U+1F3FD) = ๐Ÿ‘๐Ÿฝ. Not all human emoji support skin tones โ€” only those depicting individual body parts or people.

Related Terms

Code Point Code Point
A unique numerical value assigned to each character in the Unicode standard, written in the format U+XXXX (e.g., U+1F600 for ๐Ÿ˜€). Emoji Accessibility Emoji Accessibility
Making emoji usable for people with disabilities, including screen reader descriptions, accessible designs, and representation emoji. Emoji Sequence Emoji Sequence
An ordered set of one or more Unicode code points that together represent a single emoji character.

Related Tools

๐Ÿ” Sequence Analyzer Sequence Analyzer
Decode ZWJ sequences, skin tone modifiers, keycap sequences, and flag pairs into individual components. ๐Ÿ”€ Platform Compare Platform Compare
Compare how emojis render across Apple, Google, Samsung, Microsoft, and more. See visual differences side by side. โŒจ๏ธ Emoji Keyboard Emoji Keyboard
Browse and copy any of 3,953 emojis organized by category. Works in any browser, no install needed.

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