Prior to the addition of the Rainbow Flag emoji 🏳️🌈, the Rainbow emoji 🌈 was used (in terms of emoji) to symbolize Pride in reference to the flag. Slater’s proposal gained wide support and the Rainbow Flag emoji 🏳️🌈 was officially approved in 2016. Slater referred to the flag as “a powerful and potent symbol of not only current gay rights struggles, but the history of gay rights in America” and provided evidence to the Consortium that the flag had been used to symbolize Gay Pride since the 1970s. On June 27, 2015, Noah Slater sent an email to the Unicode Consortium-the organization that approves new emoji-and requested that they officially add an emoji that depicted a rainbow flag. The Microsoft version of the emoji depicts the flag attached to a grey flag pole. On Twitter, the flag resembles a rectangle with rounded corners.
On most major platforms, the emoji depicts a flag waving in the wind that has, starting from the top, a red, orange, yellow, green, blue, and violet stripe. The emoji is a combination of the White Flag emoji 🏳️ and the Rainbow emoji 🌈. The Rainbow Flag emoji 🏳️🌈, also popularly called Pride Flag emoji, was added to Emoji 4.0 in 2016.
