An Emoji update in 2021 will give couples more skin tone variations to choose from

More skin tone variations are coming to the world of Emoji.

The Unicode Consortium, which selects new character variants each year, gave smartphone users a mini-update on Friday, unveiling the types of characters set to be available in 2021.

The Emoji 13.1 update will bring 217 new character sequences. Of those, 210 are skin tone changes while the other seven are new animated characters.

Most of the skin tone changes on the horizon will give you a more diverse set of couples to choose from.

Right now, multi-person Emoji are only available in yellow. Next year, you'll be able to choose from varieties that can be used to represent interracial relationships or pairs of people with varying skintones.

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Seven emoji options are completely new, including Face in Clouds, Face Exhaling, Face with Spiral Eyes, Heart on Fire and Mending Heart. Android and iOS users are also getting an Emoji that represents a woman with a beard and a non-gender specific person with a beard.

The Unicode Consortium tweeted generic images depicting the upcoming Emoji. However, the images are just samples and vendors for mobile platforms create their own stylized versions.

Typically, the Unicode Consortium cooks up dozens of new Emoji and shows them between January and March before the graphics lands on smartphones in Septemeber and Octoboer. This year, because of the pandemic, the nonprofit delayed its big release, opting for this minor update instead.

The characters unveiled Friday will be widely available next year.

Follow Dalvin Brown on Twitter: @Dalvin_Brown.

This article originally appeared on USA TODAY: Emoji update 2021: More skin tone variations for couples