(London) Lowri Moore, a British student, has been fighting for years to ensure that children who wear glasses are no longer stigmatized. His latest battle: get the creation of “cooler” emojis to represent people wearing glasses.
Posted at 10:34 a.m.
At just thirteen years old, the young girl can already boast of having inspired the American giant Disney for her film Encanto whose heroine wears glasses. Its “GlassesOn” campaign has been a resounding success with thousands of young people and parents around the world.
Now, a new American giant is in its sights: the organization responsible for creating emojis, these small drawings, often round and yellow faces, which can for example be integrated into messages, emails or on social networks. .
Lowri, from Nottinghamshire in central England, wrote to the Unicode Consortium, a non-profit organization based in California, to create an option to add glasses to existing emojis.
People believe that children are no longer stigmatized these days for wearing glasses, but in reality many refuse to wear glasses because they are afraid of appearing “different and uncool”, says the schoolgirl met by AFP.
Studies show that children who wear glasses are 35% more likely to be bullied at school.
Yet, failure to wear glasses when needed can have damaging consequences. “You can’t learn properly, and that will limit your opportunities, and you’ll probably have great difficulty in life because you haven’t worn your glasses. It’s not fair,” Lowri says indignantly.
Stereotype of ” nerd »
The girl’s fight for emojis came to her when her mother, Cyrilyn, tried to find an emoji representing her daughter.
“She looked at those who might have represented me, but she only found an image of “nerd””. As she continued to search, she came across a grandmother and a teacher, which obviously didn’t represent me at all,” Lowri recalled.
“It doesn’t look very positive so we’re just asking for an option to add glasses to existing emojis,” she explains, showing a copy of the letter she sent to the Unicode Consortium.
“I would like to see an option to add glasses to emoji faces, as one can already change the color of their skin or hair,” she wrote.
The only current emoji available to children can be “harmful for them because it contributes to the dissemination of a negative stereotype which is very difficult to destroy”, she added, in this letter of which she sent a copy on Wednesday at the London headquarters of Google and Meta.
“Inspiring”
Lowri’s struggle began in 2019, when she wrote a letter to entertainment giant Disney asking it to show more characters wearing glasses in its films.
Two years later, the heroine of the film Encanto, Mirabel Madrigal, appears on the screens with glasses. Its director, Jared Bush, admitted to having been inspired by the letter from the British schoolgirl.
“I am your biggest fan, you are very inspiring to me,” he replied, adding that he would have liked to have informed her earlier but that he had to keep it a secret until the release of the film.
For her work, Lowri was chosen this year as “Activist of the Year” by the International Agency for the Prevention of Blindness (IAPB).
For children who need them, not wearing glasses can prevent them from developing their eyesight properly and cause preventable health problems.
For IAPB’s Jessica Thompson, Lowri’s activism helps highlight these dangers.
“If you have trouble seeing, you have trouble learning,” she told AFP. Wearing glasses is the “most effective” health gesture for school children by “reducing the risk of school failure by 44%”, she adds.