Clorox apologizes, deletes tweet after racial uproar involving emoticons

(cnnmoney) - Clorox has apologized for a seemingly harmless tweet about emojis that sparked outrage on Twitter.

The tweet, which Clorox (CLX) since deleted, showed a Clorox bottle made up of the new emojisreleased by Apple (AAPL, Tech30) as part of this week's iOS 8.3 update. Clorox tweeted, "New emojis are alright but where's the bleach."

Apple's new iOS 8.3 release consists of 300 new emojis, including kissing lips, googly eyes and a smiling poop (we wish we were making that up). But they also include racially diverse emojis, including cartoon faces with brown and black skin.

In its tweet, Clorox seemed to be commenting on why bleach wasn't included among the hundreds of other household items that Apple had added to its list of emojis. But on social media, offense was taken.

"You need to clean up your PR person. Put some bleach on your distasteful marketing ideas," tweeted @DriNicole. "Black emojis were added today. Saying this implies you'd rather the emojis be only white, by adding bleach."

After taking down the tweet, Clorox followed up with an apology: "Wish we could bleach away our last tweet. Didn't mean to offend - it was meant to be about all the [toilet, bathtub and red wine] emojis that could use a clean up." read the rest