DiGiulian created a gender- and race-equal emoji. Photo: EmojiPedia
Until today, you had to use words. Yes, actual words made out of letters to respond to a text message saying something like: “Yo! Let’s go climbing this weekend!”
But as of today’s release of emojis by EmojiPedia, the creator of most emojis out there, including those used by Apple, Google and Microsoft, you can use one of its symbols instead. Why type out letters, words and grammatically complete thoughts when you drop a 100 emoji on your buddy’s dome?
And who do you have to thank for this technological innovation? None other than pro climber Sasha DiGiulian, who submitted the just-completed emoji design after tweeting last year about what a bummer it was that a climber emoji didn’t exist. She tagged the emoji people, who told her to submit one, and her submission carried the day.
Check out Sasha’s Instagram post about her emoji. Look familiar?
Like all other emojis, you can choose a man or woman in several different skin tones. It’s weird that such a popular and fast-growing sport took so long to get its own emoji given the occasionally head-scratching list of others that do. Alongside skiing, snowboarding, swimming, and stick-and-ball sports, these activities have their own icon: wrestling, water polo, cartwheeling and handball.
