Rayouf Alhumedhi, who now lives in Vienna, proposed the idea last year to The Unicode Consortium, the non-profit corporation that reviews and develops new emojis.she's delighted that Apple accepted it. It was unveiled Monday on World Emoji Day as one of a collection of new emoji characters available on Apple devices later this year. She first had the idea in her bedroom in Berlin, where she lived with her family for five years after moving to the German capital from Saudi Arabia."My friends and I were creating a group chat on WhatsApp," Alhumedhi told CNN in an interview last year, "and I obviously had no emoji to represent me.""The fact that there wasn't an emoji to represent me and the millions of other hijabi women across the world was baffling to me," she said.
"I really had no initial idea in my mind of what it was supposed to look like, I just wanted it to be available in different skin tones millions of women from different races do wear it." she drafted a proposal on her laptop and sent it to Unicode. "I did it very quickly. I did not understand how big a deal this was," she said.J Jennifer 8. Lee, a member of the Unicode emoji subcommittee, put Alhumedhi in touch with Aphee Messer, who worked with the teenager to design the emoji. And she hopes it will promote tolerance too. Once women wearing headscarves "begin to show up on our phones, that will establish that notion that we are normal people carrying out daily routines just like you," she said last year."I wanted to be represented, as simple as that. I just wanted an emoji of me."