A 15-year-old girl has proposed designing a hijab-wearing emoji after she felt that none of the available choices represented her.

Rayouf Alhumedhi sent her proposal to The Unicode Consortium, a non-profit corporation that reviews and develops new emojis, after failing to find an emoji to represent her in a WhatsApp group chat with her friends.

The schoolgirl's idea has even gained the backing of the co-founder of online discussion forum Reddit, Alexis Ohanian.

If approved, the emoji will be available in 2017.

In her proposal, Rayouf, who was born in Saudi Arabia but now lives in Berlin, wrote: "In the age of digitalisation, pictures prove to be a crucial element in communication...

"Roughly 550 million Muslim women on this earth pride themselves on wearing the hijab. With this enormous number of people, not a single space on the keyboard is reserved for them...

"To say it's [the hijab] an integral aspect of women's lives is an understatement."

As with other emojis, Rayouf called for the user to be able to change the character's skin tone to represent themselves to reflect the "religious and racial diversity present in the Muslim community".