Lesbian Emojis Are Now Available for All Your Communication Needs
Emoji are great for communicating complicated ideas when words fail and only a smiley pile of poo can express what you feel inside. But the officially-available emoji have been rightly criticized for their failures of diversity: Just about every emoji is light-skinned, and–at the risk of sounding like an undergrad sociology paper–they’re largely heteronormative (“two ladies dancing” emoji notwithstanding.)
Fortunately, the iTunes App Store has expanded the options for ladies who love ladies by approving the Lesbian Emojis app. The set of emojis was created last year by Kimberly Linn, an associate creative director at L.A. agency Pitch, and they add a heap of new emoji options that represent some of the joys of lesbian life in visual shorthand. They range from the figurative (hey, a fish taco!) to the culturally useful (a rollerderby girl!) to the explicit (Denise Richards and Neve Campbell making out in Wild Things!). They gleefully play into certain stereotypes of lesbian life–there’s a Home Depot emoji–as well as reveal certain truths that rarely get much attention in the straight world (there’s a “help wanted ads” emoji, too, for “lesbian unemployment”). Linn turned her emoji innovation from an Instagram art project into a real thing you can use with the help of Pitch Black, an incubator program at Pitch that funds employees’ creative personal projects.
Now, the next time you need to send someone a Double Rainbow, a Unicorn, or a rainbow-colored wedding cake, you’ve got an option.