Apple celebrates World Emoji Day with new icons for the iPhone

The company also turned its most senior management into animated characters

(Getty Images)

The iPhone is getting more than 70 new emoji as Apple tries to make the set even more representative.

The company celebrated World Emoji Day by announcing new characters to better show people with red hair, gray hair and curly hair, a new emoji for bald people.

There are also new kinds of expression: a cold face, a party face, a pleading face and a face with hearts. And there will be a whole host of new animals and foods, including pictures of lobsters, parrots and peacocks and mangoes and cupcakes.

In all, there are more than 70 new characters which together update most sections of the iPhone's keyboard.

All of the new faces will be coming to the the iPhone, iPad, Apple Watch and Mac in a free software update later this year.

As with many of Apple's other updates, the changes respond to ​updates in the Unicode standard, which decides what emoji will be allowed. As well as expanding the variety of icons that are on offer, the updates often focus on improving representation, such as those illustrating people with red hair.

Apple chooses which of those standards to incorporate into its keyboard, and then decides how they are illustrated. That means that many of the new updates might not arrive on other platforms straight away, and that they will almost certainly look different.

In all, there are thousands of emoji inside the Apple keyboard. And each of them is celebrated on 17 July – known as World Emoji Day because it is the date used on the emoji representing a calendar.