Curly Hair Emojis Are Here Thanks to Dove Hair #LoveYourCurls
In today’s increasingly digital and social world, 74% of people report using Emojis daily, and 67% of all women and girls agree they can better express what they want to say with Emojis than with words. Yet despite the popularity, expansion and diversification of Emoji graphics within the official Unicode keyboard following recent updates, there still remains a “one size fits all” hair type for female emojis – straight and sleek, the traditional beauty ideal.
To offer a solution for the one in three women in the US with curly hair and the 82% of curly women and girls who say they’d like to see more female emoji options depicting what their hair looks like, Dove Hair is proudly introducing the Dove Love Your Curls Emojis – the first emoji keyboard designed to represent curly girls everywhere. Now when curly women and girls send messages to friends, they can finally express their beautiful, curly self!
The Dove Love Your Curls Emoji Keyboard, developed in partnership with Snaps -- the first end-to-end platform for brand marketing across messaging applications and devices, are now available for free download in the App Store and Google Play, and can be used in text and messenger systems, including iMessage, SMS/text, Facebook messenger and WhatsApp (standard data rates apply). The keyboard contains 27 unique curly hair designs, with selectable skin tone and hair color – resulting in a total of 131 curly emoji variations, including seven animated GIFs to bring curl expression and love to life!
Dove’s Love Your Curls Emojis are part of the brand’s ongoing Love Your Curls campaign, which encourages women to celebrate, love and take pride in their curly hair.
“Dove Hair is committed to redefining traditional standards of beauty and ensuring women and girls see accurate reflections of themselves in the world around them, including, and especially, in digital and social media - which is why we’re so excited to introduce the Dove Love Your Curls Emojis,” shared Rob Candelino, VP of Haircare at Unilever. “1 in 3 women in the United States have curly or wavy hair, yet there are zero images of these women today in the increasingly common language of emojis. That felt wrong to us, so we are fixing it and hope by doing so, we will continue inspiring all women to love their curls.”
To understand the emotional impact of inclusionary emojis on women and girls, the brand commissioned a survey of 1500 women and girls in the US on their emoji usage. Sali A. Tagliamonte, Professor of Linguistics at the University of Toronto, has partnered with Dove Hair on the launch of the Love Your Curls Emojis to help shed light on this research and how self-expression via emojis has become an important aspect of the evolving language landscape. “When you have a symbol that embodies someone’s identity, it’s powerful,” says Tagliamonte. “The new Dove Love Your Curls Emojis have the ability to empower curly women to be more themselves.”
Additionally, to celebrate the launch of the Dove Love Your Curls Emojis, Dove Hair will also be partnering with Twitter so that each time women and girls share a #LoveYourCurls moment, a custom Dove Curly Emoji will auto-generate within the tweet.