You’ve done something silly, but not so serious that it warrants a face-to-face conversation. Quick, send an emoji to lighten the mood!

But which one do you use? After all, there isn’t really an emoticon to ask for forgiveness.

Yeah, the praying hands and hearts exist but they don’t quite hit the spot. So campaigners from Finland are trying to find the perfect little symbol to represent forgiveness.

A number of charitable and peace-building organisations, led by the Evangelical Lutheran Church of Finland are crowdsourcing to find the ideal emoji (must be a quiet day in Finland).

They’ve asked their Instagram followers to come up with ideas to represent the biblical sentiment – an eye for an eye will make the world blind, after all.

Once the suggestions are pooled together, a proposal will be sent before the end of the year to the Unicode Consortium who decide what to include in standard emojis.

So who knows, in 2020, we might be texting over a yellow hand holding an olive branch.

Some of the suggestions include a band-aid forming a cross over a red heart, an olive branch on top of a heart and lots of hand-holding.

On the website created to raise awareness for the campaign, hailed #forgivemoji, it explains: ‘At the moment, there are 3,019 official emojis. There’s a kissing cat, an astronaut, a magnet and three kinds of vampires. But there’s no emoji that says “I forgive you”… for now!

‘This is something the #forgivemoji campaign wants to change! We want to highlight the importance of forgiveness and peace. Peace is not possible without forgiveness.’

And to that end, you can submit your own proposal or simply choose from the ideas floated.

Tuomo Pesonen, from the Evangelical Lutheran Church of Finland, also added: ‘In our modern digital communication culture, emojis are an essential way of expressing human feelings beyond words.

‘We were surprised to realise that the official emoji selection has dozens of different cats and even two designs of zombies, but there isn’t an emoji for forgiveness.’

At the moment there are thousands of emojis, with regular updates reflecting society, and even really niche ones such as the aerial tramway and the input symbol for Latin capital letters (that’s the ABCD one).

Which made Finnish folks wonder why there was none for a universal emotion – being sorry.

Anyone with any strong ideas can submit their proposal on the #forgivemoji website.

Who knows, it might be one small way you change the world.

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