Guidance Images, Person With Headscarf Emoji

The guidance images for the Person With Headscarf Emoji provide representation for Muslim women on the digital keyboard. Designed by Aphelandra Messer for a Unicode Consortium proposal initiated by Rayouf Alhumedhi, in collaboration with Jennifer 8. Lee and Alexis Ohanian, the guidance images depict one of three iterations for the proposed emoji: the bust of a woman with black clothing and a beige headscarf; a beige headscarf in a ghost state with phantom wearer; and a beige scarf as a loose item of clothing.

Emoji are picture-based characters used in digital communications. Since their origins in Japan in 1997, emoji have come to be recognized as a visual communication system, offering the ability to add emotional nuance to digital text and providing universal ways to express information. In 2007 and 2009, Google and Apple petitioned Unicode Consortium, the global regulator that maintains text standards across digital devices, to accept emoji as a language system for standardization. By 2010, Unicode recognized emoji as a communication system and Apple introduced the first emoji keyboard in 2011.


Today, each pictograph added to the emoji keyboard is overseen by Unicode Consortium. Anyone can submit a formal proposal for a new emoji to the Consortium. The proposals include guidance images, such as these. Once an emoji is approved by Unicode, the guidance image is shared with vendors such as Apple, Google, Microsoft, Samsung, and Facebook to render the emoji based on their device, platform, aesthetics, and operating standards.


The proposal for the Person With Headscarf Emoji was submitted to Unicode Consortium in 2015 by Alhumedhi, then a 15-year-old Saudi Arabian teenager living in Berlin, following a group chat with friends. Each of Alhumedhi’s friends used an emoji to represent themselves, but there wasn’t an emoji to represent Alhumedhi, who is Muslim and wears a hijab. Instead, she used the Man With Turban Emoji and Woman Emoji, connected by the Left-Right Arrow Emoji. This led her to draft a proposal that caught the attention of Jennifer 8. Lee, vice-chair of the Unicode Emoji Subcommittee and co-founder of Emojination, a group that seeks to make emoji more inclusive and representative. Lee collaborated with Alhumedhi to strengthen the proposal and commissioned graphic designer Aphelandra Messer to design the guidance images.


The proposal was approved by the Unicode Consortium in 2016 and the emoji arrived on devices in 2017 as part of a broader movement to ensure representation of various backgrounds and cultures on emoji keyboards.

Guidance Images, Person With Headscarf Emoji; Graphic design by Aphelandra Messer (American, born 1993); Project headed by Rayouf Alhumedhi (Saudi, born 2001); Collaborator: Jennifer 8. Lee (American, born 1976), Alexis Ohanian (American, born 1983); Firm: Emojination; images (computer generated); Gift of Emojination; 2020-1-1

This object was previously on display as a part of the exhibition Give Me a Sign: The Language of Symbols.