Skin tone modifiers were added to the emoji standard in 2015, giving people the option to pair many hand and person emojis with one of five tones based on the Fitzpatrick scale, a system originally developed for dermatology research and adapted here for representation.
Not every emoji supports skin tones. Generally, it's limited to hands, gestures, and person or body emojis — a 👋 (waving hand) supports tones, but a 🐶 (dog face) obviously doesn't. If an emoji you're looking at doesn't show a tone-selection option on your keyboard, that's usually why.
Using a tone that matches your own skin is the most common and least fraught choice, and it's how most people use the feature: as a small way to represent themselves accurately, especially in a hand-wave, thumbs up, or clapping-hands emoji.
Where it gets more nuanced is using a tone that isn't your own to represent someone else in a message — say, describing a friend's outfit or referencing a public figure. There's no universal rule here, but many people default to the neutral yellow/default tone in those cases specifically to avoid assumptions.
The default (yellow) emoji, without any modifier applied, isn't meant to represent a specific race — it's simply the base design before any tone is layered on. Choosing it isn't a political statement; it's often just the fastest option or a deliberate choice to stay neutral.
Some gestures get even more specific: two-person emoji like Handshake 🤝 support 25 skin tone combinations rather than just 5, since each hand can be set independently. It's a small detail, but it means the tone system is more flexible than most people realize.
Curious which emoji support tone modifiers at all? Browse the People & Body category, where every applicable emoji has its available tones listed directly on its own page.
Written by
House of Emojis EditorialEditorial team
House of Emojis is an independent, free emoji reference. Our guides explain what emoji mean, where they came from, and how people use them in everyday conversation.