The emoji have been involved in lots of racial issues and disputes, and to try and stay clear of it all, Microsoft has simply opted to select a gray color for its generic emoji characters.
The emoji are highly popular and Japan, and have been conquering fans all around the world in the past couple of years. With it also came the racial issues, complaining about the emoji skin tone, that eventually led to the possibility of selecting the skin tone among several different presets.
But even then the criticism persisted. As some platforms used the yellow color for the generic emoji people - which wasn't taken lightly by some orientals, who took it as an insult. And now MS makes a different chromatic choice: its Windows 10 generic emoji will have a gray skin tone (let's see if zombies won't complain about it ;P).
There are
other emoji updates, and some of them remind us that while an image can be worth a thousand words, sometimes the opposite is also true, because there are some emoji that seem to be quite ambiguous or non-descriptive of what they should be.
Would you believe the emoji on the right to be a face with
look of triumph? Well, I wouldn't either. But as this is the expression that is being used on iOS and Android, MS simply opted to keep the mistake.
A mistake that wasn't repeated in other emoji, like the potential problematic "middle finger" one, that has been missing on Android and iOS. In this case, MS did implement it for Windows 10 (maybe a subtle hint to its competitors?) and now we'll just have to wait and see how long it will take for Google and Apple to do the same.
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