Update, 8/9/2017 at 5:20 p.m.: Heads up, redheads! According to a press release, the redhead emoji is set to debut in June 2018 — woohoo! We know it's still a bit of a wait, but at least it's officially on the way now!

Original, 1/20/2017 at 10:05 a.m.: Redheads, rejoice! A ginger-haired emoji could finally be in the works.

Following a petition to urge Apple to create an icon which represents those with auburn locks, emojis with red hair are on the agenda at the Unicode Technical Committee, Emojipedia reports.

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The meeting, which is hosted by the tech giant, aims to respond to complaints about the lack of redhead emojis by establishing how the new icons would be implemented in future iOS updates.

The options to be explored include a new "person with red hair" emoji, as well as a custom hair tag, which could be applied to existing emojis. However, as the blog points out, there has been no formal decision on whether these possibilities would be approved and even if they were, they wouldn't arrive until 2018 at the very least.

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The red hair proposal comes after Apple introduced racially diverse emojis that allowed users to change the skin tone from the default yellow to one of five colour options in 2015. In November, the Unicode Consortium approved a hijab, gender neutral and breastfeeding emoji.

Although there could be a quite wait before the arrival of a redhead emoji, it's a step in the right direction for the 20,000 supporters of this petition, set up by website Ginger Parrot two years ago.

"Natural redheads may be rare at less than 2% of the world's population, but that is 138,000,000 iPhones waiting to happen," the site explains.

With a small but significant upgrade, Apple could be about to make a lot of people very happy.

From: Prima