Ever watch a true crime special and want to text a friend about the plot developments? New emojis for that are coming: a fingerprint and a shovel. And if you’re someone who needs at least three cups of coffee before you feel awake enough to talk to someone, there will be a new emoji for that, too: a sleepy face with bags under its eyes. Eight new emojis (including a leafless tree, a root vegetable, a harp, and the flag of Sark, a British island territory) were announced as Emoji 16.0 in September 2024, but they’ll take time to appear on your emoji keyboard.
Emojis aren’t magic; they come from the Unicode Consortium, a global nonprofit founded in 1988 to provide character encoding standards. When you look at your computer screen or smartphone, you see colors, images, videos, fonts, and emojis, but the information is sent across the data signal as numbers. All the fancy stuff you see is assigned a numerical value by Unicode (to simplify computer programming to an extremely basic level). The first emojis — illustrations designed to be more complex than the punctuation-based emoticons such as 😉 — were released in 2015, but it’s a democratic process (and one we’ll cover in more detail in a future edition). Anyone can submit a proposal to Unicode for a new emoji. Once the new emojis are selected and announced to the public, designers take the sample image and any other specifications included in the proposal and create the actual images for each platform.
You might have noticed that emojis look slightly different when you send them between iPhones and when they appear on Facebook or when sending between an Android and an iPhone. This is because Unicode only provides character codes for the emojis, and then it’s up to each vendor to decide how the emojis display on their platform or device. Developers add the new designs to the emoji keyboards, and these will appear with software updates. (If you see a white box where a new emoji should be, update your operating system. Stop procrastinating on that phone update!)
While the harp emoji likely won’t be ready for Christmas carol texts this year, you should be able to use Emoji 15.1 by now. This release includes Head Shaking Vertically 🙂↕️, Head Shaking Horizontally 🙂↔️, Phoenix 🐦🔥, Lime 🍋🟩, Brown Mushroom 🍄🟫, Broken Chain ⛓️💥, and various skin tones and directional variations for individual people walking, running, in a manual wheelchair, in a motorized wheelchair, with a cane, and kneeling.
