Research by Unilever's Dove noticed that all of the thousands of emojis they saw had straight hair. So to fill the gap, and help promote Dove Quench products for women with naturally curly hair, the brand is launching the Dove Love Your Curls Emoji Keyboard.
It may be hard to see emojis addressing a significant social problem, but Unilever VP-Haircare Marketing Rob Candelino believes they can.
“Emojis are a language of pictures, so when people use that language, they want a symbol that offers them the choice of their individual image, style, or personality," explains Sali Tagliamonte, Dove Language Expert and Professor of Linguistics at the University of Toronto. "The diversity of emojis need to reflect the diversity of our population today, where more than one in three women in the U.S. have curly hair.”
Dove's research found that only 10% of women and around 40% of girls actually like their curly hair.
The keyboard has 27 curly hair designs with selectable skin tone and hair colour that results in 131 variations, including seven GIFs.
The new emojis are available for free to download today at the App Store and Google Play.
A Dove "Love Your Curls" video launched last year got 9.3 million views in one day, he said, and a free customizable "Love Your Curls" children's e-book on Amazon has had more than 150,000 downloads, all pointing to the gap in representation of girls with curls.
Dove will partner with Twitter so that each time someone shares a #LoveYourCurls hashtag, a custom Dove Curly Emoji will auto-generate within the tweet.
