On July 17, World Emoji Day was celebrated, and what better opportunity than to present the new emoticons that we can find very soon on our keyboards? Apple has taken advantage of this day to show us some of the emoticons that will be released with iOS 11, which will arrive in the coming months.
Among them, we find the new (and more than necessary) emoji of a nursing mother which, although it may seem somewhat frivolous, will be a great step towards the normalization of breastfeeding. Billions of people around the world will have on their keyboards a woman who breastfeeds her baby. It will begin to look with other eyes.
An essential emoji
Although it is the most normal thing in the world, it has been practiced since the beginning of humanity and is the best food you can offer your baby, breastfeeding it's not always well seen.
It is quite beaten and badly accepted, especially when it comes to breastfeeding in public places or, when, unfortunately, it is considered somewhat obscene. Poor breastfeeding!
Therefore, everything that makes it visible and normalizes In the eyes of children, teenagers, men, women, grandparents and grandmothers, it seems great news. And Apple, no doubt, reaches many, but many people of all races and all countries of the world.
Predictably, it will arrive in September
With them we can express ourselves beyond words. From a crazy face, a exploring head, a zombie, a dinosaur, a bearded man, an elf, a woman with a hijab or a person practicing yoga are some of the new 56 emojis for iOS, watchOS and macOS.
Nobody announces a designated date. In this way, they maintain a higher expectation, although everything seems to indicate that predictably for September, when autumn comes, we will definitely have them.
The story behind the new lactation emoji
Before an emoticon reaches the keyboards of our phones and tablets, it goes through a very complex and bureaucratic process supervised by the Unicode Consortium, the organization that oversees the creation of emojis.
Breastfeeding has been proposed by Rachel Lee, a registered nurse at the University College of the London Hospital. Although it is also said that another of the requests was made by Berenice Morzone, an Argentine nutritionist who initiated a petition on Change.org to make it possible.
When it was proposed in Emojipedia, it was one of the most voted icons in 2016, and very soon, finally, we can use it.
