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Scots are being urged to stake their claim as the home of the redhead and back a campaign for a ginger emoji.

Earlier this year Apple added more ethnic diversity to the range of emoji available to text-messaging apps.

A petition raised by website Ginger Parrot, which calls on the tech giant to include redheads, has gathered almost 11,000 supporters.

Ginger Parrot's Emma Kelly said Scots were among 138 million people not being represented in mini digital form.

Ms Kelly told ´óÏó´«Ã½ Radio Scotland: "Redheads go through their lives being teased quite a lot and sometimes worse, I'm not saying Apple has anything against redheads, but I was surprised when redheads weren't included in the recent emoji update.

"That was actually off a petition to diversify the skin tones, so I think there's about four or five versions on most of the emojis on the new update.

"When they came out I was really excited and I thought - 'this is it, this is our time!' - but there was one that would have fitted just in the middle and it wasn't there.

"We may only be 2% of the whole world, but in Scotland there's 13%, and even if it's only 2% of the world it's around 138 million people if you calculate it."

Ms Kelly said that now that her petition had broken 10,000 she was going to approach Apple to ask for the new emoji.

The campaign, petitioning Apple and the Unicode Consortium, pleads: "If you say you're going to diversify, why not add a few red-haired emoji in the mix?"