Wink in All Colors
This techinque of merging two characters at rendering time is how this new emoji spec handles various skin tones. An emoji followed by a skin color swatch can be merged at glyph-rendering time to represent that emoji with that skin color.
If the emoji rendering system doesn’t implement this ligature, it will display the emoji followed by a graphical representation of the swatch of the skin color. This fallback is ugly, to be sure, but it signals the intent of emoji-sender effectively.
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“When a human emoji is not followed by a emoji modifier character, it should use a non-realistic skin tone, such as that typically used for the smiley faces, or a silhouette.”
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@Jesper Unfortunately, Mac OS X doesn’t support many of the flags, as I discovered when building this page.
[…] See also: Wink in All Colors. […]
The most inspired solution since Regional Indicator Symbols - http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Regional_Indicator_Symbol - the letters A-Z between code point U+1F1E6 and U+1F1FF, where a device might at its discretion replace an ISO code written with these letters with a flag. (Which is exactly how the Emoji flags are encoded today.)