Netflix Profile Icons Are Now Customizable

Netflix users now have another way to make their profiles more personal, with the streaming service offering customers the option to add a personalized icon to their profile to better display their favorite fandoms.

The change marks the first for profiles since they were introduced in 2013, and will now allow users the chance to use their favorite characters from Netflix shows as their profile icon to show off their personality, from the stoic Luke Cage to the bubbly Kelly Kapowski.

Characters up for grab include Eleven from Stranger Things, the titular character from The Unbreakable Kimmy Schmidt and Queer Eye's hair guru Jonathan Van Ness.

Engadget shares that the character icons will begin rolling out to the Netflix website, mobile and other streaming devices over the next few weeks.

Previous icons were simple cartoon images that have been the only option for the platform's users to spice up their profiles for the past several years and were overdue for an update. They've now gotten one, with embellished versions of the flat avatars now available for users while they wait for their favorite characters to arrive.

While users might appreciate this change, many Netflix fans aren't too excited about the platform's upcoming show Insatiable, which stars Debby Ryan as a teen who, through a freak accident that caused her to have her jaw wired shut, lost a substantial amount of weight and is now out for revenge on the classmates that previously bullied her.

A Change.org petition to halt the show's scheduled August 10 release currently has nearly 140,000 signatures, with the petition's creator, Florence Given, slamming the show's "toxicity."

"For so long, the narrative has told women and young impressionable girls that in order to be popular, have friends, to be desirable for the male gaze, and to some extent be a worthy human...that we must be thin," Given wrote.

"The toxicity of this series is bigger than just this one particular series. This is not an isolated case, but part of a much larger problem that I can promise you every single woman has faced in her life, sitting somewhere on the scale of valuing their worth on their bodies, to be desirable objects for the male gaze," the petition continued. "That is exactly what this series does. It perpetuates not only the toxicity of diet culture but the objectification of women's bodies."

"This series needs to be canceled," she concluded. "The damage control of releasing this series will be far worse, insidious and sinister for teenage girls than it will be damaging for Netflix in their loss of profit."

Photo Credit: Netflix