You may soon be able to change the gender and hair colour of emojis

Emoji might be about to get a whole lot more customisable.

The Unicode Consortium, the non-profit body that governs the wildly popular pictograms, is mulling a proposal to add the options to let users alter the hair colour and gender of their emoji.

Emojipedia, an online resource for all things emoji-related, has put together a good breakdown of the what the proposal will entail.

Two key aspects relate to gender and hair colour.

You can already choose the skintone of many human-looking emoji - there's an option of five (relatively) realistic skintones, as well as a generic yellow.

In much the same way, the proposal will allow you to choose the colour of the emoji's hair - with options including ginger, sandy, brunette, very dark brown, silver, and bald. Here's a mockup of how they might look, mixed with different skintone emoji, courtesy of Emojipedia:

Another part of the proposed update would allow users to specify the gender of an emoji they want to use - or the lack of it. Sufficiently human emojis would be able to be either male, female, or neutral. Here's an example of how the (currently male-looking) Man in Business Suit Levitating might look, again via Emojipedia:

There are a few other proposed changes too. Users will be allowed to change the direction of emojis - so the pointing finger could point left instead of right, or the angry cat's gaze could be flipped. And there's also sub-region flags - opening the door to the inclusion of Scottish, Welsh, or US State flags.