People & Body Emoji — Hands, Faces and Skin Tones

People & Body is the largest emoji category, holding 2418 entries on EmojiSelect. It contains everything human: hand gestures, individual people, professions, families, and body parts — plus the skin-tone and hair variants that make those emoji personal. The size comes from the modifier system: since Unicode 8.0 (2015), most people emoji accept one of five skin-tone modifiers derived from the Fitzpatrick scale, so a single base emoji can appear as six distinct characters, each with its own codepoint sequence.

The category also contains the most technically interesting emoji: ZWJ sequences. Many professions and family configurations are built from simpler emoji joined with the zero-width joiner (U+200D). A family of four is not one character but a sequence of component people linked into a single glyph, which is why not every older system renders them the same way. Our technical section on each page shows exactly which codepoints make up every sequence.

Because modifiers multiply entries, the 2418 items here are organized by subcategory — hand fingers, people, gestures, roles, activities, families and body parts — and every person, hand and body part that accepts skin tones links to its six tone variants. The category page also links the skin-tone reference, so the whole modifier system is one click away.

Why it matters

People & Body emoji carry identity, and identity is sensitive. Choosing a skin tone is a personal statement, not a requirement — the default yellow tone is deliberately neutral. We document the six-tone system on every eligible page and keep the modifiers one tap away in search and on the keyboard. The category's growth tells its own story: professions arrived as ZWJ sequences in Emoji 4.0 (2016), the handshake gained tone modifiers in Emoji 12.0, and each release since has expanded roles, gestures and family compositions.