Clorox has apologized for a tweet it put out on Wednesday that many believed had a racist implication.
The tweet included a picture of a Clorox bottle made up of Apple's new emojis, which include racially diverse faces with brown and black skin, according to CNN Money. The Oakland, Calif.-based company wrote above the picture "New emojis are alright but where's the bleach."
While Clorox may have been referring to bleach not being one of Apple's new emojis, many on social media didn't think that was the idea.
"You need to clean up your PR person. Put some bleach on your distasteful marketing ideas," @DriNicole tweeted. "Black emojis were added today. Saying this implies you'd rather see emojis be only white, by adding bleach."
Other Twitter users who expressed their opinion on Clorox's tweet included @QueenTalibah, who wrote "@Clorox you guys couldn't possibly think that tweet would be a good idea," and @krennylavitz, who wrote "Yeah.. You deff knew what you were tweeting," Adweek reported.
Clorox has since removed the tweet and sent out an apology to those who thought it had some sort of racist implication in what it wrote.
"Wish we could bleach away our last tweet," the company wrote on Twitter. "Didn't mean to offend- it was meant to be about the [toilet, bathtub and red wine] emojis that could use a clean up."
The tweet was put up on the same day that Apple released its iOS 8.3 update, which comes with 300 new emojis. Among the new options are the more racially diverse emojis, as well as kissing lips, googly eyes and smiling poop.
"We apologize to the many people who thought our tweet about the new emojis was insensitive," Clorox spokeswoman Molly Steinkrauss said, adding that offending people was not the goal. "We did not mean for it to be taken as a specific reference to the diversity emojis -- but we should have been more aware of the news around this. The tweet was meant to be light-hearted but it fell flat."
