PC Emoticons

Evidently, these people have way too much time on their hands. From the UK Guardian: "The Unicode Consortium, an industry body devoted to the development and promotion of software standards, has proposed a draft plan to add a range of five skin tone options for human emoji characters...Emoji are cartoon-like pictograms often sent via text messages to convey emotion and humor."  Can't you just use words instead of smiley faces? And why is the color of pictograms in a text message even considered important at all?