Emoji don’t just pop up out of nowhere — they are carefully crafted with a lot of oversight from the Unicode Consortium, a non-profit standardization body for Unicode. As part of this system, there are voting members from Apple, Google, and Microsoft who help determine what gets added to the Unicode Standard. Now, these voters have approved a new set of emoji that most of us should see appear on our devices over the course of the next year.
Emojipedia announcedthat, as part of its release ofUnicode Standard version 15.1, Emoji 15.1 has been formally approved. This text encoding standard, developed by the Unicode Consortium, supports text in all major writing systems. So it is safe to say that most phones will have the emoji very soon. Thecandidates we talked about earlier this yearhave been approved, and now we have a list of what’s to come. As you can see, the draft emoji list has not changed sinceEmojipedia previewedEmoji 15.1 ahead of the 10th annual World Emoji Day celebration:
Six new concepts are introduced in Emoji 15.1 as well as four new family emoji combinations with gender-neutral options. Add those 10 to the 108 new versions of pre-existing people emoji with directions specified, and you get a total of 118 new emoji overall.
The full 108 new direction-specific people emoji are included in Emoji 15.1, each supporting the usual gender and skin tone variations, and having a different look depending on what device you are using. This list of emoji uses zero-width joiner sequences, meaning that every new emoji can be represented as the combination of two existing ones. An example is the phoenix, which can be represented as a combination of 🐦 bird and 🔥 fire.
These may not seem like much, but getting multiple big companies to sign off on something like new emoji is a big deal. It was up to companies like Apple, Google, and Microsoft to choose the style and direction of some emoji. This is the first time the Consortium is specifying a direction for emoji, which is also a big deal. As part of the Consortium’s efforts to promote inclusivity, the family silhouette emoji are gender-neutral by design. Although we knew the emoji needed to be approved in September, there is no timeline on when they will arrive, so it may be a year or more before they become available.
