Regional Indicator Symbols

U+FE0E

VARIATION SELECTOR-15 - force black-&-white emoji. If this code point follows an emoji, an explicit monochrome rendering of the emoji is requested (if the client supports it)

host of characters

, that add to the characters before. Those are called Combining Marks. Unicode provides a handy FAQ on the details, but in a nutshell: If you add one after a character, it is placed on top of that previous one. So, a + ̊ = å. This may lead to all kinds of funny problems, because for some combinations there are pre-composed characters. Our little å here can also be encoded as U+00E5. You might note, that while this has a length of one character, the combination of a and combining ring has a length of two characters

U+FE0F

VARIATION SELECTOR-16 - force colorful emoji. If this code point follows an emoji, an explicit colorful rendering of the emoji is requested (if the client supports it)

U+1F3FB to U+1F3FF

. They are called “Emoji Modifier Fitzpatrick Type” 1 to 6, with 1 the palest and 6 the darkest. If one of these characters follows an emoji, that emoji is meant to be rendered in the appropriate skin color of the Fitzpatrick scale. If no such modifier is added, the skin tone should be unnatural, e. g., bright yellow. Fun fact: Since the Fitzpatrick modifiers are normal code points, emoji with such skin colors have the length 2, which Twitter users noticed first. Here is a comparison chart directly from the specification: