Marcel Sydney Launches Global Campaign with Tinder to Fight for Interracial Couple Emoji

There's an emoji for everything these days. And everyone. Well, nearly everyone. Unicode, the company behind Emoji, offers emoji for people of many races and emoji for same-sex couples, but one group of people is still excluded from emoji representation: interracial couples.

Together with Marcel Sydney, Tinder, one of the world's most popular dating apps, has created a global campaign that leads people to a petition that aims to change this.

They might be small icons on a screen, but emoji have also become a universal language of this digital age. A recent study suggested that Tinder, and the popularity of dating apps today, is responsible for an increase in interracial marriages - so it's high time that interracial pairs join the emoji party.

The new project, called #representlove, the interracial emoji couple project, will ask Unicode to give mobile phones the option to customize the skin tone of the couple with the heart emoji. In a statement, Tinder said: "No one should ever feel unrepresented or unseen. Love is universal, and it's time for interracial couples to be represented in our universal language."

The online film, directed by Tim Kindler through Heckler, highlights the fact that there are thousands of emoji for almost everything and everyone, but none that represent interracial couples.

The campaign also invites people to #representlove by uploading an image of themselves for a chance to be turned into their very own emoji. A team of designers will create bespoke emoji based on over 250 design combinations to match the couples. For the chance to receive their own couple emoji, couples simply upload a picture on Twitter or Instagram with #representlove. Hundreds of bespoke emoji have already been created.

The campaign has already drawn in celebrities in interracial relationships, such as Nicole Richie, and Alexis Ohanian, the founder of Reddit.

Says Wesley Hawes, creative lead at Marcel Sydney: "It's exciting to work on a global campaign with such a positive message. And for a cool, global brand that people love. It's an ambitious social project, but our army of designers from LA, Sydney, Germany and France, who are answering couples' posts live, have been up to the task."

The campaign has generated a lot of online abuse and racist commentary. So much so, a bespoke video response was created featuring all the couples who have taken part in the project, to personally answer trolls.

The campaign launched on 27th February in the US, and followed the time zones through to Australia. It has already been picked up by Vice, Wired, Fast Company, Vogue, High Snobiety, Mashable, The Independent, Hypebeast, and Newsweek, to name a few.

People can sign the Interracial Couples Emoji petition on change.org. The original signature goal was 1000. The petition stands at 9058 and counting.

This is part of Tinder's core mission to create a more diverse and inclusive platform. Because interracial couples everywhere deserve a place on your keyboard. Click here for a full copy of the survey results.