Grandmother creates emoji to better reflect older people
LONDON -- Emoji aren't just a means of embellishing our messages with poop, monkeys and salsa dancers. They're a way of expressing our identities.
But, what if the information desk girl or the unicorn emoji don't represent who you are?
56-year-old Diane Hill -- a grandmother from Coventry, UK -- is fed up of emojis that don't cater for the over-50s, and don't reflect what older people want to do and say.
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She got in touch with the BBC, after it launched an outreach project asking listeners if the media could do more to reflect the lives and people around them.
Hill complained that there were currently no emoji to reflect the lifestyles of older generations.
The idea for a range of emoji came out of some embarrassing emoji-related exchanges that Hill had had after injuring her back in a car accident.
"I have a really bad back and I wanted to tell my friend about it with an emoji that looked like me when I writhed around the around the floor in pain," Hill told Mashable.
"Do you know what, stuff that I wanna say to my friends like "I'm going out shopping to spend the kids' inheritance", or an emoji that lets my kids and grandkids know that they're in big trouble, I can't find an emoji to depict that," Hill continued.
BBC Coventry and Warwickshire commissioned local artist Chris Oxenbury to design the emoji -- or 'emoldji' as it's been called -- based on Hill's ideas.
The range of emoji includes false teeth falling out, memory pills, aches and pains.
The designs have been sent off to the Unicode Consortium for consideration in the hope that they will appear on mobile phones and devices across the world in the future.
Topics Family & Parenting
Rachel Thompson is the Features Editor at Mashable. Rachel's second non-fiction book The Love Fix: Reclaiming Intimacy in a Disconnected World is out now, published by Penguin Random House in Jan. 2025. The Love Fix explores why dating feels so hard right now, why we experience difficult emotions in the realm of love, and how we can change our dating culture for the better.
A leading sex and dating writer in the UK, Rachel has written for GQ, The Guardian, The Sunday Times Style, The Telegraph, Cosmopolitan, Glamour, Stylist, ELLE, The i Paper, Refinery29, and many more.
Rachel's first book Rough: How Violence Has Found Its Way Into the Bedroom And What We Can Do About It, a non-fiction investigation into sexual violence was published by Penguin Random House in 2021.
