The hijab emoji, as it's informally known, was submitted in 2016 to the Unicode Consortium, a nonprofit that oversees emoji standards with voting members from the world's top digital companies. It arrived on phones and computers in 2017. A then 15-year-old Saudi Arabian girl, Rayouf Alhumedhi, attracted worldwide attention as she campaigned for its inclusion. She was selected as one of Time magazine's most influential teens of 2017.
Roughly 550 million women in the world wear the hijab, Alhumedhi among them, yet there was no emoji to represent them. The same was true of skin tones, and advocates remain vigilant in getting multiracial family emoji on keyboards, beyond the two-person couple options.