Nicolas Loufrani: Young Londoners Design Afro Hair Emojis

In October 2024, BBC London published an interview with Jayzik, a young person working with the Rise.365 community support group. Jayzik and Rise.365 had just embarked on a project designing emojis featuring black and mixed-race hairstyles to improve representation.

In the interview with BBC London, Jayzik said she felt there was a negative stereotype around hair textures like Afro that need to be removed. Reflecting on the need for Afro emojis, Jayzik said it would ‘help us to feel seen’, pointing out that while there are almost 4,000 emojis, none feature black or mixed-race hairstyles.

Emojis are essentially visual representations of human emotions, people, objects and certain symbols. Today, emojis are widely used by people all over the world as part of everyday life, having spread across the internet via social media platforms, test messaging and other informal modes of communication. The key benefit of emojis lies in their ability to convey feelings and emotions that are challenging to express via text. While Nicolas Loufrani is not the emoji creator or owner, in a 2017 interview with Vice he said that emojis had undoubtedly been inspired by Smileys.

In 1996, Nicolas Loufrani joined the Smiley Company, an organisation established by his father Franklin Loufrani, the renowned Smiley Face creator and owner. Nicolas took Franklin Loufrani’s iconic Smiley trademark and created a ‘Smiley Dictionary’, incorporating icons expressing various emotions, as well as sports, objects, weather signs, celebrities, celebrations, food and more. His categorisation was followed by major tech companies when they created their own emojis. To create this universal visual language, he worked in front of a mirror, mimicking emotions to visualise the right representations. For example, to express love, he chose a round yellow face with hearts as eyes, while he expressed ‘cool’ with an image of Smiley in sunglasses.

The Smiley Company started developing Smileys in the Afro style with its first release of the Smiley Dictionary in 1999. Dreadlocks and Jheri curl were the first styles introduced, with several other styles added in the following years – including a super-cool ’70s Afro style. In a 2019 interview with the Standard, Nicolas Loufrani said that the Unicode restricts freedom of speech and should have thousands more icons.

Over the years, emojis have grown to become a ubiquitous element of digital communication, emerging as a universal visual language that bridges both cultural and generational devices. Today, more than 90% of internet users rely on emojis, with 70 billion sent every day according to a 2023 PUIIJ report. Surveys and interviews with young adults and teenagers suggest that this iconic pictorial language resonates strongly with this demographic as their preferred form of expression, uniting and connecting global users via an innovative form of universal non-verbal communication.

Rise.365 has developed four Afro designs featuring braids, styles and locs worn and designed by the young people the organisation helps. Chavez, a young person involved in Rise.365, explained to BBC London that these Afro hair emojis were designed with the goal of combatting negative stereotypes, especially in a school environment. In a poll involving 104 of its black and mixed-race members, Rise.365 found that 61% had experienced bullying or discrimination on the basis of their hair type or hairstyle, and 63% had experienced someone touching their hair without their consent. Unveiling the new icons, Rise.365 announced plans to submit them to the Unicode Consortium for consideration.

Amina Grey serves as a youth mentor at Rise.365. She explained that the group needs to show there is a need for the emojis, suggesting that people could help simply by searching for Afro hair emojis in search engines. As the governing body of emojis, Unicode will consider Rise.365’s new emojis next April. Rise.365 has been appealing to black and ethnic minority communities to search for Afro hair emojis on Google, feeding into the data Rise.365 will use on its application form. As Amina Grey suggested, the more data Rise.365 gets the more likely its submissions will be approved. By ensuring equal representation of black and mixed-race people, Rise.365 hopes to start conversations around the bigger issues of discrimination.

Alban Parsons

“Social media evangelist. Baconaholic. Devoted reader. Twitter scholar. Avid coffee trailblazer.”