Why doesn't UTF-8 include a black frowning face?

January 19, 2016 10:05 AM

UTF-8 includes a white smiling face ☺, a white frowning face ☹, and a black smiling face ☻. However, I haven't been able to find a black frowning face. Why is that?

Surely it's not as simplistic as the happy black stereotype? Surely?

(Not sure whether to categorize this as "society & culture" or "computers & internet".)

posted by clawsoon to Society & Culture (14 answers total)

The white and black smiling faces were in the original IBM PC character set, so they're in Unicode for backwards compatibility. Why there isn't a black frowning face, I don't know.
posted by zsazsa at 10:14 AM on January 19, 2016 [1 favorite]

This post on the Unicode mailing list claims: "There is no U+xxxx BLACK FROWNING FACE because no such character existed in the legacy character sets that were used to help populate the Miscellaneous Symbols block."
posted by zsazsa at 10:23 AM on January 19, 2016

Response by poster: Hi zsazsa - I can't find your quote ("There is no...") on the page you linked to. Thanks.
posted by clawsoon at 10:32 AM on January 19, 2016

link w that quote
posted by andrewcooke at 10:37 AM on January 19, 2016

Whoops, wrong post. This is the one I meant to link. And here is another post (by the same person!) that basically says the same thing. I wonder what legacy character set that the frowning face came from, but it probably just had non-specific smiling and frowning faces.

I've tried digging up why the original IBM PC had both white and black smileys, and couldn't find anything substantive, other than a quote from Bill Gates saying the smileys came from the Wang word processor. I couldn't find anything about the character set on those.
posted by zsazsa at 10:38 AM on January 19, 2016

I don't have an answer about unicode but there have been some improvements on the emoji front in terms of representation. Many emoji sets are now including a skin color option that you can set. Currently it only applies to the more 'realistic' face/person emojis but the 'iconic' smiley faces may get the option too in the future instead of all being cartoon yellow. Here's what some of them look like: 👦🏾👧🏽👨🏿
posted by metaphorever at 10:39 AM on January 19, 2016

The selection of emoji characters was initially very Japanese-centric (having been invented by NTT for their Japan-only i-mode service) and it's pretty arbitrary. The latest emoji spec has a specific section on specifying skin colours for emoji people, but implementation is not universal yet because it's pretty new. Like, why is there a Mt Fuji emoji, bento box and fish cake emojis? The initial emoji set are really, really Japanese.

But basically these two happy faces aren't black and white in terms of mapping to black people and white people, they're iconographic and are meant to be used in situations where the "white" smiling face wouldn't have sufficient contract on a white background or whatever. That emojis lack any sort of skin tone is being addressed in the spec above.
posted by GuyZero at 10:48 AM on January 19, 2016 [3 favorites]

UTF-8 is just one of the possible Unicode encodings. Any Unicode character can be represented in UTF-8. Unicode does not contain the character you want.
posted by w0mbat at 10:50 AM on January 19, 2016

Note that the Dingbats font (maybe it's Wingdings?) which was distributed with either Windows of MS Office seems to be the source of the black and white happy faces, as can be seen in the sample on the Wikipedia page. This particular font doesn't have a frowning face which presumably came from a different source prior to it's adoption by the Unicode spec.
posted by GuyZero at 11:06 AM on January 19, 2016

So looking more closely it does seem like it's Wingdings which has "white" smiling and frowning faces and not Dingbats. I thought I saw a black frowning face in one Dingbats example but then I couldn't find it in any others, so I'm not sure what that one really comes from.

At any rate, it seems like these specific characters aren't from the Docomo emoji spec in terms of lineage.
posted by GuyZero at 11:12 AM on January 19, 2016

Also, from a Unicode FAQ:

Q: What about characters whose names include WHITE or BLACK?

A: Names of symbols such as BLACK MEDIUM SQUARE or WHITE MEDIUM SQUARE are not meant to indicate that the corresponding character must be presented in black or white, respectively; rather, the use of “black” and “white” in the names is generally just to contrast filled versus outline shapes, or a darker color fill versus a lighter color fill. Similarly, in other symbols such as the hands U+261A BLACK LEFT POINTING INDEX and U+261C WHITE LEFT POINTING INDEX, the words “white” and “black” also refer to outlined versus filled, and do not indicate skin color.
posted by GuyZero at 11:19 AM on January 19, 2016

for a bit more historical context, the original CP437 character set from the IBM PC would normally have been presented as light-on-dark on a monochrome screen, so the filled glyphs that are now described as "black" were green or amber on a dark background, and the "white" ones were dark with a green or amber outline. current naming is the reverse of the original glyph presentation.
posted by russm at 1:54 PM on January 19, 2016 [1 favorite]

It's worth noting, on the "black/white" vs. "filled/outline" front, the choice to use the former is a consequence of the Unicode naming schemes being developed after GUIs became the standard way of interacting with computers. When computers were still mostly text-and-symbol terminals, referring to part of a glyph as black or white was horrifically ambiguous, since displays were almost all black-background (with a foreground that might be white, amber, or green) while printing was almost all black-on-white, so the same glyph that would be "white" on a screen would be "black" in print. But in modern systems a white background and black text is the default (if not universal) standard for both display and print, so the Unicode consortium can blithely label things "black" and everyone knows that by black they mean "foreground color".
posted by jackbishop at 1:59 PM on January 19, 2016 [1 favorite]

The so-called "white" faces are green in the center with a white outline on the (non-professional) green background of this site, and the so-called "black" face is white.
posted by yohko at 10:10 AM on January 20, 2016