Rewrite every skin tone in a text column to one tone

emoji_retone() rewrites the text so that every emoji that can carry a skin tone carries tone, every person in a multi-person emoji alike, and "default" takes the tones out. It rewrites glyphs for an experiment and describes no person; see Glyphs, not people in tidyEmoji.

Usage

emoji_retone(data, text, tone = "default", presentation = "emoji")

Arguments

data

A data frame or tibble containing a text column. Grouped data frames are accepted. The verbs that work a row at a time (adding columns, or keeping and expanding rows) carry the grouping through to their result, as dplyr::mutate() and dplyr::filter() do. The verbs that pool across rows – the counts, the co-occurrence edge lists, the time series – warn that they ignore the grouping and return one corpus-wide answer.

text

The text column to scan, supplied unquoted. Any atomic column is accepted and read as character, so a factor works and a numeric, Date or logical one simply contains no emoji. A list column – or a data-frame column – is refused rather than coerced, because coercing one deparses it and the emoji found would be in the code rather than in your data. What counts as an emoji is the same in every verb; see the Detection section of tidyEmoji for the one case that surprises people, code points that are emoji only when they carry U+FE0F.

tone

The tone to write: "default" (no tone, the default), "light", "medium_light", "medium", "medium_dark" or "dark".

presentation

Which code points count as emoji: "emoji" (the default) or "any".

"emoji" requires emoji presentation, so U+2764 U+FE0F is an emoji and the bare U+2764 is not. This is the default and it will stay the default: widening it would silently recount every corpus already analysed.
"any" also reads the text-presentation spellings Unicode lists for an emoji (the bare heart, U+263A, U+2714, a keycap without its selector), because several keyboards emit them. It never reads the copyright, registered and trade-mark signs (U+00A9, U+00AE, U+2122), which are typography far more often than they are emoji.

"any" only ever adds occurrences: everything "emoji" finds, it finds too, in the same place. emoji_coverage() reports how many it adds and how many of those a lexicon can score, which is the cost of the choice in one number. Every verb that counts, scores or rewrites the emoji in a text column takes this argument, so counts still agree across the package for whichever value you use. The flag verbs do not need it, since a flag has no text-presentation form.

Value

data, as a tibble, with the text column rewritten and two columns added: .emoji_n_retoned (the tone-able occurrences now in tone, the ones already in it included) and .emoji_n_unretonable (those left as they were for want of a catalogue spelling). The two add up to emoji_skin_tone()'s .emoji_n_modifiable. A grouped input stays grouped.

Details

Why it exists. The way to measure how a model treats skin tones is to give it the same text in each tone and compare, as "Digital Skin, Digital Bias" (Li et al. 2026) does for language models and emoji embeddings. A regular expression over U+1F3FB to U+1F3FF gets multi-person emoji and the selector cases wrong; this reads the catalogue instead. A paired design:

arms <- c("default", "light", "medium", "dark")
copies <- lapply(arms, function(t) emoji_retone(d, text, tone = t))
# score each copy with your own model, then compare the arms row by row

Rules. The rewritten spelling is always one the catalogue lists. Where there is none, the occurrence is left as it was and counted in .emoji_n_unretonable; on the Emoji 18.0 catalogue that never happens. A swatch standing alone is left alone, and so is every emoji that cannot take a tone. The column is rewritten in place, as emoji_sanitize() does.

References

Li, M. et al. (2026). Digital skin, digital bias: uncovering tone-based biases in LLMs and emoji embeddings. Proceedings of the ACM Web Conference 2026. doi:10.1145/3774904.3792508

Examples

d <- data.frame(text = c("thanks \U0001f44d\U0001f3fd",
                         "\U0001f9d1\U0001f3fb\u200d\U0001f91d\u200d\U0001f9d1\U0001f3ff"))
emoji_retone(d, text, tone = "dark")
#> # A tibble: 2 × 3
#>   text      .emoji_n_retoned .emoji_n_unretonable
#>   <chr>                <int>                <int>
#> 1 thanks 👍🏿                1                    0
#> 2 🧑🏿‍🤝‍🧑🏿                       1                    0
emoji_retone(d, text)
#> # A tibble: 2 × 3
#>   text      .emoji_n_retoned .emoji_n_unretonable
#>   <chr>                <int>                <int>
#> 1 thanks 👍                1                    0
#> 2 🧑‍🤝‍🧑                       1                    0