Emoji Skin Tone Guide: When to Change It and When to Use Yellow
Hand and people emoji come in five skin tones. Why they exist, the debate in English-speaking countries, views in Korea and Japan, and tips for work accounts.
Hold down 👍 on your phone keyboard and, besides the yellow one, five thumbs in different skin tones pop up. Maybe you picked one without thinking and that color kept showing up as your default, or maybe you've wondered, "Is it okay to switch these around?"
The short answer is that there are no fixed rules for choosing a skin tone. But if you know why the feature exists and how different countries see it, picking one for the situation gets a lot easier.
Where the five skin tones came from
Most of the first people emoji in Unicode came in one color, yellow or a light flesh tone. These are characters people all over the world use, and criticism kept coming that they couldn't represent a variety of people. In 2015, Unicode added a way to change skin tone. Starting with Apple that same year, several companies began supporting it.
The method is simple. You attach one character that stands for a skin tone right after a people emoji. There are five of these tone characters, with Unicode numbers from U+1F3FB to U+1F3FF.
- 🏻 Light skin tone
U+1F3FB - 🏼 Medium-light skin tone
U+1F3FC - 🏽 Medium skin tone
U+1F3FD - 🏾 Medium-dark skin tone
U+1F3FE - 🏿 Dark skin tone
U+1F3FF
For example, 👍🏽 is 👍 with 🏽 attached. A device that understands skin tones combines the two and draws a single medium-toned thumb. On an older device that doesn't understand them, you see the thumb with a separate colored square beside it.
The Fitzpatrick scale
These five steps are based on the Fitzpatrick scale used in dermatology. It's a classification by the American dermatologist Thomas Fitzpatrick that sorts skin into types 1 through 6 by how much it burns in the sun. For emoji, the lightest types 1 and 2 were merged into one, which gives five steps.
Yellow is the "nobody in particular" color
The yellow you get when you don't pick a skin tone was chosen on purpose as a neutral color that doesn't stand for any particular race. It's a color no real person has, and it's used as the default that stands for "anyone," like a cartoon character. So using yellow is closer to not choosing a skin tone at all.
Skin tone options apply only to hands, body parts and person emoji like 👍 👋 🙏 ✌️ 👏 💪 and 👩💻. Face emoji like 😊 have always been yellow only. For emoji with two people like 🧑🤝🧑, some devices let you choose a different skin tone for each person.
The debate over choosing, in English-speaking countries
After skin tones arrived, there was a lot of discussion, especially in English-speaking countries where people of many backgrounds live together, about which color to use.
- Many people say choosing a tone close to your own is the most natural thing to do, since the whole purpose of skin tones is to express yourself as you are.
- Some white users say they stick with yellow because picking the lightest tone feels like it draws attention to their race.
- Others see it the opposite way: yellow isn't really neutral, since it looks like light skin was made the default.
- Using a skin tone different from your own, especially a darker one, for jokes or exaggerated acting can be taken as mocking another race and draw criticism.
In other words, in English-speaking countries picking a skin tone is often taken as more than decoration. It's tied up with identity. It's worth knowing this when you chat with friends abroad or with overseas business contacts.
How Korea and Japan see it
In Korea and Japan, skin tone options aren't used much. Most people use the yellow that appears first and don't think much about changing it.
So when someone in Korea or Japan receives an emoji with a changed skin tone, they tend to react with something like "why is the color different all of a sudden?" more than think about what it means. It's also common for a tone picked by accident to stay as the keyboard default, so people end up sending a different skin tone without realizing it.
That said, some people in Korea and Japan do choose a tone close to their own, and nobody finds that strange in itself. Either yellow or your own tone feels natural. What to watch for is using a tone very different from your own for no particular reason, which, in a chat with foreigners in it, may be read through the English-speaking lens described above.
What to do on work and public accounts
In places where many people are reading, such as company messengers, customer notices, and official accounts of organizations or brands, we recommend the default yellow.
- Yellow doesn't point to any particular race, so it causes the fewest misunderstandings in writing that many different people read.
- If an official account uses a particular skin tone, some people may read meaning into that choice.
- For an individual, using their own skin tone in a work chat is no problem. If the color changed by accident, though, it's tidier to set it back to the default.
- If you want to show several skin tones on purpose, as in a diversity campaign, mixing several colors evenly gets the intention across better than using just one.
- 👍👏Safe confirmation and praise in work chat
- 🙏A request and thanks
- 👋A light greeting
Resetting the default tone on your keyboard
On most phone keyboards, holding down an emoji lets you pick a skin tone, and the last one you chose is shown as the default next time. If a color you don't want keeps appearing, hold down the same emoji again and pick yellow or the color you want once.
Using the skin tone section on this site
On the detail page of any emoji whose skin tone can be changed, EmojiCanvas has a skin tone section. On the 👍 page, for example, 👍🏻 👍🏼 👍🏽 👍🏾 👍🏿 are shown side by side.
- Tap the skin tone you want and that emoji is copied right away. It's especially handy on a PC, where holding down a key isn't easy.
- The large default emoji and copy button at the top are the yellow default.
- In the designs section, you can compare three designs: Noto, Twemoji and Fluent. Each company draws yellow and each skin tone a little differently, so take a look.
- If an emoji has no skin tone section, its skin tone can't be changed.
Summary: yellow by default, your own color when you want to express yourself
Skin tones are a feature that lets anyone use an emoji that looks closer to themselves. Yellow is a neutral color that represents no one, and the five other colors are options for expressing yourself.
In personal chats, use whatever feels comfortable, yellow or your own tone. For work and official accounts that many people see, yellow is the safest, and as long as you avoid using a skin tone different from your own as a joke, you can use them without trouble in most situations.
Last checked 2026-10-22