Tech companies are working with the Unicode Consortium to implement a new skin tone control for character emoji to allow users to more accurately express themselves (and their identity). 

We now learn how these companies propose Unicode implement this change using a skin tone modifier. The technique being proposed is simple enough to be implementable and usable on a phone. Additionally this technique is backward compatible with devices that don't yet support the skin tone modifier (i.e. the emoji would fall back to the original non skin tone adjusted version). 

The Unicode consortium hasn't accepted this new proposal just yet but it would be hard pressed to turn it down (considering most tech users today are members of a visible ethnic group).

I'm all for diversity and think this is a positive step. Hopefully this becomes a new standard soon.

You can read the proposal here (link).