Who doesn’t love new emojis? Sure, we all use the classics, but can you imagine digital life without Melting Face or Salute Face? (I certainly can’t.) So, when you hear about new emojis in the works, it’s always good news.
Before we get too carried away, these emojis aren’t ready for primetime just yet. Instead, it turns out the Unicode Consortium, the organization which maintains the Unicode standard, has released a short list of new emoji candidates for Unicode 16. This list contains seven new emoji and one new flag, and, if approved, will be included with the rest of the Unicode 16 standard in a future version of iOS and Android. In all likelihood, a version of iOS 18 and a version of Android 15 will get the following emojis:
Face With Bags Under Eyes
Fingerprint
Leafless Tree
Root Vegetable
Harp
Shovel
Splatter
Flag: Sark
I imagine, among these eight, the “face with bags under eyes” will get the most use. Even Unicode’s interpretation of the emoji is fun, so I look forward to what designers for Apple, Google, Samsung, and other companies make of it. As for Sark, it’s a tiny, autonomous, car-free island located between England and France. I’m happy its population of 562 will soon have an emoji of their flag.
As these eight emojis are heading into the Unicode 16 beta, it’s not clear when we’ll actually see them both accepted and on platforms like iOS and Android. The beta itself lasts through July 2. The last time we got an emoji update was back in January: Those of us on iOS got six new emoji with iOS 17.4, including Head Shaking Horizontally, Head Shaking Vertically, Phoenix, Lime, Brown Mushroom, and Broken Chain. Truth be told, I’m not sure I’ve used a single one of those since they launched. (I guess I don’t shake my head enough.)
