💬 The Wrap
Welcome to the 62nd edition of the Emoji Wrap, Emojipedia's free newsletter! 🌯📯
At the start of this week, the 118 new emoji additions from Emoji 15.1 - the latest list of emojis approved by Unicode - made their official debut on a select number of mobile devices worldwide. 🆕📲
These new additions include a 🐦🔥 Phoenix, a 🍋🟩 Lime, two types of shaking heads (one 🙂↔️ Horizontal and one 🙂↕️ Vertical), and a series of direction-specifying people emojis each with the usual gender and skin tone variation options.
But even those deeply familiar with all of the active emoji vendors’ designs may not be able to immediately tell which type of devices these emojis made their debut within. 🔍🤔
This is because these new Emoji 15.1 additions arrived within an emoji update that overhauled this vendor’s smiley, people and gesture, animal, and food emojis, as well as several others across the remaining emoji categories. 🎨✨
The vendor in question is Samsung, who through the release of their new One UI 6.0 Android 14 update debuted a completely new visual style for the majority of its emojis for the first time since their emoji set's initial launch back in April of 2013.
While the 2023/2024 emoji list is only just making its debut on devices, this week the expected 2024/2025 emoji list - Emoji 16.0 - had its first list of provisional emoji candidates announced. These seven possible additions - namely a Face with Bags Under Eyes, a Fingerprint, a Root Vegetable, a Leafless Tree, a Harp, a Shovel, and a Splatter symbol - are still about 10 months away from receiving formal Unicode approval. Nevertheless, they could well be amongst the emojis reaching our devices and platforms at this time next year. 🔮🗓️
Not all recent emoji news has centered around Emoji 15.1 and the new provisional candidates for Emoji 16.0, however.
Since our last edition two vendors debuted their 2022/2023 emoji support (including one completely new emoji design set) while another is expected to finally release their Emoji 15.0 support in the next few weeks in not one but two formats. Read about all this and more below. 🪷🪟
✨ New Emojis
⚫ Samsung One UI 6.0 Emoji Changelog
Samsung's One UI 6.0, was released at the start of this week and overhauled the designs of over 2,500 emoji designs.
The release of One UI 6.0 also meant that for the second year running Samsung became the first major emoji vendor to directly provide support for Unicode’s latest set of emoji recommendations on their devices.
(That being said, while Samsung debuted these designs directly on devices first, the monochrome Google Noto Emoji font was quietly updated to support Emoji 15.1 back in September.)
✅ What's New in Unicode 15.1 & Emoji 15.1
In September the latest list of emoji recommendations from the Unicode Consortium was formally approved.
They were released alongside version 15.1 of the Unicode Standard, the Unicode Consortium's core text encoding standard that is designed to support the use of text written in all of the world's major writing systems.
Here we detail the new additions in both Unicode 15.1 and Emoji 15.1.
🔮 New emoji coming at you in 2025 💥
Here Unicode Emoji Subcommittee Chairperson Jennifer Daniel details the list of provisional emoji candidates for 2024's expected Emoji 16.0.
These seven new proposed emoji concepts were brought before the Unicode Technical Committee (UTC) just yesterday.
📰 News
🪷 Huawei HarmonyOS 4.0 Debuts Brand New Emoji Set
Back in August of this year, the mobile manufacturer Huawei released its own native set of emoji designs via its new HarmonyOS 4.0 update.
Huawei's new emoji set was the first completely new set of device-specific native emojis for an Android device since the mid-2010s and meant that select Huawei devices have joined all of Samsung's devices in having their own custom emoji set despite running on an Android-based system.
📨 Gmail’s new emoji picker on the web is getting a long overdue upgrade
As reported here by The Verge, the web version of Gmail (which uses Google's Noto Color Emoji designs) has had its emoji picker updated to allow users to select skin tone and gender variations for a variety of emojis - a feature this particular emoji picker has previously been lacking.
🧑🍳 Gboard’s Emoji Kitchen is now integrated into Google Search for web, iPhone, etc
The much-beloved Emoji Kitchen mashup feature for Gboard recently officially debuted outside Android devices.
Now Google users across both web and mobile will be able to access a truncated version of the mashup feature directly within Google Search simply by searching the term "Emoji Kitchen".
🪟 3D emoji are finally coming to Windows 11
While support for Emoji 15.0 has been in beta for Windows 11 devices since February of this year, a more recent update accessible by those subscribed to Microsoft's Windows Insider Program debuted the glossy, gradient-heavy versions of the Microsoft Fluent emoji designs across select Microsoft platforms, including Word and Powerpoint, thanks to their new COLRv1 color font format.
(Note that Microsoft Teams has supported a selection Emoji 15.0 emojis since April of this year).
🦄 JoyPixels 8.0 Emoji Changelog
Since our last edition, JoyPixels have released version 8.0 of their freemium emoji design set, introducing support for Emoji 15.0 emojis such as the 🩷 Pink Heart and 🫨 Shaking Face.
💭 Interesting
💸 Barbie beats Oppenheimer at the box office - and on Cash App too
Data Scientist Hamdan Azhar (who has previously contributed to the Emojipedia blog) outlines a variety of trends related to the "Barbenheimer" across the fintech platform Cash App, including which emojis were most used in P2P payment referencing 'Barbie' (💕 Two Hearts) and 'Oppenheimer' (💣 Bomb)
🌊🐴 Was There Ever Really A Seahorse Emoji? TikTok Swears It Existed - So We Investigated
Log this Tiktok-based investigation into whether or not there was ever a seahorse emoji alongside previous year's claims on Twitter / X that there was a robber/thief emoji at some point.
🤗 Lastly
That's it for this edition of the Emoji Wrap!
For all the latest emoji news and analysis you can follow Emojipedia on Twitter/X, Bluesky, Mastadon, Instagram, Facebook, LinkedIn, and YouTube.
You can also follow the members of our Emojipedia team:
- 📚 Senior Emoji Lexicographer Jane Solomon
- 🎨 Head of Sample Emoji Design Joshua Jones
- 📰 And me, Emojipedia's Editor In Chief Keith Broni