Are Apple emojis are a little bit racist?

Apple is working on giving more cultural diversity to its emojis - because at the moment all the people on there are whiter than an EDL march.

It followed an email complaint by Joey Parker of MTV Act, who emailed Tim Cook, Apple's CEO, to say that there were no black, brown or Chinese heads in the emoji vocabulary. The email was forwarded that same day to Katie Cotton, vice president of world wide corporate communications.

'Tim forwarded your email to me.' She wrote. 'We agree with you. Our emoji characters are based on the Unicode standard, which is necessary for them to be displayed properly across many platforms. There needs to be more diversity in the emoji character set, and we have been working closely with the Unicode Consortium in an effort to update the standard.'

The last emoji update was in 2012 when they added some same sex couples to the mix. So when can we expect a multicultural cavalcade of differently coloured faces to tag onto our tweets and emails? Nobody knows yet, but maybe one day emoji-land will catch up with the rest of the world.

While they're at it, could they also update their other emoticons? There are currently no emojis for gin and tonics or sex toys, which means it makes it hard for me to describe what I'm up to at the weekend.

Thanks.