π§Όπ§½
I am not sure if some emoji's are genius or cursed. Example: π©βπ©βπ§βπ§ is actually composed of two U+1F469 WOMAN emoji: π© and two U+1F467 GIRL emoji: π§β, seperated by U+200D ZERO WIDTH JOINERs(ZWJ). Kind of fun, the family emoji are composed by their members.
This approach also has a benefit: may the glyph not be avaliable, it can be just displayed as the members of the family.
This has an effect on size though: in UTF-8, this emoji π©βπ©βπ§βπ§ is 25 bytes. The 4 individual characters are 4 bytes each, add 3 zero width joiners which are 3 bytes each, et voila, 25 bytes. A "normal" character is 1 byte. So for the same amount of bytes, you can have I love the duck very much
Emoji skin colour is determined by a seperate character which determines the Fitzpatrick scale after the initial character. This is without a zero width joiner. So βοΈ + πΏ becomes βπΏ
Some devices also let you this mix into families. This is not supported by Unicode RGI: Recommended for General Interchange. So you'll likely see 4 faces, but if you're lucky, you'll see a family with a defined skin tone. π©πΌβπ¨πΌβπ¦πΌβπ§πΌ
That emoji, by the way, 41 bytes in UTF-8. For every member it adds 4 bytes extra for the Fitzpatrick emoji modifier. If you're on a computer which only supports ASCII it'll display this instead: Γ°ΕΈβ©ðŸΒΒΌΓ’β¬ΒΓ°ΕΈβ¨ðŸΒΒΌΓ’β¬ΒΓ°ΕΈβ¦ðŸΒΒΌΓ’β¬ΒΓ°ΕΈβ§ðŸΒΒΌ
Also, there's a seperate family emoji that's not created by their members, but rather is just a seperate codepoint: U+1F46A FAMILY πͺ. I think this was before they came up with this.
Also cool: π¦ΉπΎββοΈ This is composed of U+1f9b9 SUPERVILLAIN π¦Ή U+1f3fe EMOJI MODIFIER FITZPATRICK TYPE-5 πΎ, a ZWJ, U+2640 FEMALE SIGN β and U+fe0f VARIATION SELECTOR-16, which is a codepoint to specify that the preceeding character should be displayed as an emoji. Here you can see the difference: β βοΈ
For a while now we had a man in a tuxedo and a woman in veil. But now with Emoji 13.0, now we can have this: π€΅ββοΈ π°ββοΈ. Which again is just π€΅β ZWJ βοΈ and π° ZWJ βοΈ. Amazing.
If you would like more Unicode shenanigans, I would like to inform you about Tiffnix's Unicode Visualizer. With this amazing tool you can explore as much UΜΈnΜiΜcoΝ’dΝe as you like. There's also the twitter account of FakeUnicode, which seems to tweet a lot about fun unicode stuff