Apple adds 300 racially diverse emojis to iOS 8.3

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300 new emoji are coming to your iPhone soon. Photo: Cult of Mac
300 new emoji are coming to your iPhone soon. Photo: Cult of Mac

Apple paved the way for racially diverse emoji to come to the Mac two week ago, and now with the release of iOS 8.3 beta 2, Apple has added access to 300 new emoji for iPad and iPhone users.

With iOS 8.3 beta 2 Apple now allows users to choose between five different skin tones for 60 different emoji. Switching between the different skin tones is just as easy as adding an accent mark to letters: simply press and hold an emoji to reveal the the entire palette of color options.

Here are some of the new emojis in action:

Emoji are now racially diverse. Photo: Buster Hein/Cult of Mac
Emoji are now racially diverse. Photo: Buster Hein/Cult of Mac

The new racially diverse emoji are also available in the new OS X 10.10.3 beta. Mac users can pull up the characters by hitting CNTRL + CMD + Space. Once your select a color variation for an emoji your changes are saved in the keyboard, so you don’t have to change them every time.

Almost all of the human emojis can be modified – including minor ones like surfer, swimmer, and runner – but Apple still hasn’t added the skin tone modifiers to the family emojis. The emojis aren’t available to the public yet, and when you send an emoji with a modified skin tone to other iOS users they just see a ‘

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