While We Celebrate Diverse Emojis, Clorox’s Tweet Lands Them In Hot Water

So just when all of the people who use and overuse emojis can rejoice that there are TWO types of little brown and black emoticons to express their deepest feelings, all heck breaks loose in Emoji land, not in the least because some corporate twitter tool misstepped on social media (like THAT never happens).

Oh where to begin?

Well, first off, as promised, Apple finally came out with more diverse emojis on Wednesday. As reported by Yahoo Tech, new emojis “with skin-tone variation” came with the iOS 8.3 update, following the premiere of its long-awaited Apple Watch.

The new emojis are all yellow, and let you choose from five skin tones to change characters with. The new Apple emojis also feature families with two moms and two dads. It should be noted that your friends won’t be able to see these new emoji unless they’ve updated their phones as well.

But not to be outdone (I mean, Apple did take a year to get these things out), a company started by two Howard University graduates, Trey Brown and Donovan Brown, called Wemojis also hit the scene recently—and they say they’ve been working on the product for two years—which would mean they did it before Apple.

Wemojis (photo above, below) claim to feature “long-awaited Black, Hispanic and culturally relevant emoticons for the Urban community.” Wemojis say that they go beyond just different skin color, but embrace “cultural nuances” as well. With everything from all of the hand signs for fraternities and sororities, to gold chains, prison bars, a Gucci (looking) bag, and du-rags, a few folks may be conflicted about what passes for authenticity, but hey, diversity can exist within groups, right?

Wemojis are available through the Apple App store, and a press release promises an Android app in a few weeks.

All good, right? Well, not so fast.

So then someone from Clorox tweeted something not so smart about Emojis and bleach on twitter yesterday, got dragged, deleted it, and had to promptly apologize for it, reports CNN.

The tweet, which Clorox (CLX) since deleted, showed a Clorox bottle made up of the new emojis released by Apple (AAPL, Tech30) as part of this week’s iOS 8.3 update. Clorox tweeted, “New emojis are alright but where’s the bleach.”

Yikes. Really Clorox?

After taking down the tweet, Clorox followed up with an apology: “Wish we could bleach away our last tweet. Didn’t mean to offend – it was meant to be about all the [toilet, bathtub and red wine] emojis that could use a clean up.”

Wish we could bleach away our last tweet. Didn’t mean to offend – it was meant to be about all the 🚽🛁🍷emojis that could use a clean up.

— Clorox (@Clorox) April 9, 2015

The story is that Clorox has been pushing for a bleach emoticon for some time now, and uh, yeah, didn’t refer to bleach and the new people-of-color characters. Poor choice of words indeed. We’ll just leave it there.