These days, I guess, emojis have been integrated into how we communicate digitally. They let us show the other person how we feel and inject aesthetics into the messages. Emojis with people in them, especially those varying ‘skin tones’, has many colors to choose from. This all means that you can customize your emoji to look better than you or the person you’re messaging. How to change Android’s emoji color and skin tone, however, we’ll walk you through it.
Android – How to change the color of your emojis
It is also important to point out that not all emojis exist with color or skin tone variations. It’s mostly all the “people” emoji, in different colors representing human characters and body parts like hands and fingers, and some smileys/emoticons.
If you’re wondering if a particular emoji supports color changes, just check to see if there’s a small gray triangle at the bottom right of the emoji icon on your keyboard. This means that if you see that triangle marker emoji has selectable color options.
Common emoji that support skin tone variations include:
- Hands/fingers: 👍👎✌️ 🤘 🖖 🤙 🤟 ✍️ 💅
- Faces/people: For the uninitiated, the post included an image of 30 sex symbols which in turn had 30 from when they were younger, 30 grown up, and 30 unshaven.
- Families: 👨👩👨👦👨👩👧👨👨👦👨👨👧👨👨👧👦👨👨👦👦👨👨👧👧👩👩👩
- Couples: 👫👬👭💑💏
Change the Emoji Color on the Gboard Keyboard
Google’s official Android keyboard app Gboard made it very easy to change emoji colors with a recent update. You can download the Gboard for free on the Google Play Store if your device doesn’t have Gboard already preinstalled. Here’s how to use it to customize your emoji:
- Any app that uses the on-screen Gboard keyboard must be brought up, eg your text messages app.
- Press the emoji button to the left of the space bar to open the emoji panel.
- See if that emoji has any small gray triangle in the corner of it, that’s the one you want to change the color of.
- Tap and hold on to that emoji. Here after a second, a pop-up panel that shows you all the different skin tones available for that emoji.
- All you have to do is simply tap the color variation you want to use to make certain changes to your snaps. Once selected, the default yellow keyboard emoji will instantly be replaced by the selected color.
- And now you just tap that emoji to insert it into your message just like before. It will maintain the skin tone you selected.
Long press an emoji to change it later! When you long press an emoji a panel will show to change the color again. Like before, your new choice will automatically propagate to all matching emoji again.
The best part is that you choose a skin tone once for one emoji, and Gboard will apply that same color choice to all the other compatible emoji. You don’t have to repeat it for each one.
A step-by-step guide to changing Emoji Color in Samsung Keyboard.
If you have a Samsung Galaxy phone, like I do, it most likely has the default Samsung Keyboard instead of Gboard. But don’t worry; changing emoji colors is just as easy:
- Go to emoji in any app and open Samsung keyboard.
- Look for an emoji you want to customize that skin tones are available. Samsung’s emoji takes the same small gray triangle marker to show color alternatives.
- Tap and hold the emoji to bring up a skin tone to select from in a pop-up above the emoji.
Note: If the color that you’ve picked will be used on that emoji and carry over to other matching emoji like in Gboard.
Changing Emoji Color in SwiftKey and Other Keyboards
The process for changing emoji colors is very similar across most mainstream third-party Android keyboards as well:
- Look up an emoji, long press, then select the skin tone from the horizontal list shown above the emoji in SwiftKey.
- To swipe through the available colors in Fleksy, tap and hold an emoji, then slide left/right on the emoji itself.
- So, pick an emoji in Chrooma, long-press it, and choose a color from the pop-up.
