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Over the past year, emojis  received a lot of attention for not being inclusive enough for the lack diverse emoticon characters. Besides diversity, an educator plans to translate the Bible into emojis, to help his students understand the religious book better. Ultimately, the goal is to have an emoji for everything. Introducing sexting emojis that are NSFW from the developers of the Flirtmoji app.

Katy McCarthy who served as the lead artist at Flirtmoji shared with The Verge, how and why she and her team created the app. Here are highlights from her interview:

How did Flirtmoji come to be?

It’s been many months in the making. All four of us had experience with jokingly and poorly substituting the existing emojis into text conversations to try to communicate sex, and it never worked. But the game-changer came because one of the guys in the group was having really elaborate texting engagement back and forth with a long distance girlfriend. We realized that we needed to do this, to draw up sex as icons, and make it completely comprehensive, funny, and diverse.

Some of these, like the vulva in particular, are really detailed and surprisingly anatomically correct. Did you have to think about ways to also make them sexy?

Well that’s the meat of the project. That’s where some of the most heated debate came out. To pass our test, the drawings have to be sex-positive. Anyone has to be able to look at them and not feel offended. There’s definitely a ton that didn’t make the cut.

 Flirtmoji seems really sex-positive and diverse. It looks like you put a lot of thought into including different races, kinks, and sexual orientations. Why was that important to you?

Well, for obvious reasons. My friends and I are not accurately represented in emoji, and it’s frustrating. And particularly with sex, we felt that it was so crucial that everyone feel sexually represented.

We wanted to be able to show this to all of our friends and have them all feel comfortable. We wanted them to be able pick their own body parts in the Emoji — within the limits of size and colors. So we invited a ton of people to come look at them and to provide feedback. We wanted them to tear it apart, or say “yes, this is good and I feel safe.” It’s not supposed to be college frat humor, although part of being inclusive is making it funny. It’s just not that hard to have everybody feel represented.

Accessing Flirtmoji is very different from accessing other types of emoji on a mobile device. They aren’t in the iTunes store, for instance, so you have to go in your phone’s internet browser and copy them into a text message, or save them to your phone’s photo album. Did you try to be included in app stores?

We never actually attempted to be included in the iTunes store. We did our research, and we were sort of disheartened by what we found. There’s this really beautiful design project called Geometric Porn that was kicked out of the iTunes store for being explicit, and it’s beautiful. It’s anatomical, it’s funny, and it’s sexy. It’s also literally triangles and circles and fleshy colored objects, so the fact that they were rejected really bummed us out.

There’s a lot of violence and games that objectify women in the app store though, so on that level, I’m pretty stoked to not be part of it. I know we’re asking people to use their phones in a different way than they are used to. But this a tiny project from four kids who care, and who went around conventional app stores. We could have built an app, tried and gotten rejected, but instead we’re just not part of that system, and I think that’s really cool.

After reviewing Flirtmoji, it is extremely diverse and seems quite fun! The app is also free of cost; all you have to do is copy the emoji you want from the app’s website and paste it into your text message thread. To “get it on,” click here.

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