Last week, Unicode approved both Unicode 18.0 and Emoji 18.0, confirming a total of 19 new emojis for our keyboards.
The day before that approval, Google quietly updated its longstanding Noto Color Emoji and monochrome Noto Emoji sets via their Google Fonts pages. The following day, Google went further, formally announcing a new GitHub page covering all of its emoji design sets, including “Noto 3D,” which recently made its debut on Pixel 11 devices.
The new Emoji 18.0 additions shown above (minus the skin tone support for the two new gestures) are rendered in the Noto 3D style, which has picked up some refinements since its Pixel 11 debut (read more here). The new GitHub page also teases animated Noto 3D designs coming soon, while confirming that the classic flat Noto Color Emoji set will remain available in both static and animated form.
Before all that design news broke, Google caused a bigger stir in mainstream emoji reporting by sharing Gboard emoji keyboard data with the New York Times, comparing emoji popularity between 2024 and 2025. The NYT paired that data with a dig through Reddit to track how usage shifts across generations. Gboard also made smaller news of its own: 9to5Google reports that a new setting will soon let users change the display size of emojis on the keyboard.
Beyond Unicode’s latest sign-offs and Google’s flurry of activity, Microsoft has been rolling out last year’s Emoji 17.0 recommendations, and the custom emoji designs found on recent devices from Chinese manufacturer Honor are now viewable on Emojipedia. The Guardian, meanwhile, reflects on the rise and fall of the wilting rose emoji with Etymology Nerd Adam Aleksic, following up our own article in June 2025.
✨ New Emojis
What’s New In Unicode 18.0 📋✅
Unicode 18.0 is now official, bringing 19 new emoji including Cracking Face, Pickle, Meteor, Lighthouse, and Eraser. Several are “break-away” designs: Pickle splits from Cucumber, Meteor from Comet, and Monarch Butterfly from the generic Butterfly, untangling concepts that had been represented by divergent designs for one codepoint across platforms for years.
Google Noto 3D Emoji Design Process 🧑🎨🦘
On their blog, Google Design and Jennifer Daniel pull back the curtain on how all 3,977 Noto emoji got the 3D treatment, and it’s a genuinely fun read. Highlights include a “Kangaroo Rule” and a three-detail-max rule to keep designs legible at 18 pixels.
Alongside outlining their design process, the article announced the existence of a new GitHub page for all things Google emoji, featuring a refined set of Noto 3D designs.
Classic Noto Color Emoji Lives On As Google Debuts Emoji 18.0 Support 🎨➡️
The day before Unicode 18.0 went official, Google quietly updated its older, flatter Noto Color Emoji font, along with its monochrome Noto Emoji companion, with designs for the new batch.
While an update to the minimalist Noto Emoji font was expected, it wasn’t known if the classic flat Noto Color Emoji design set would be receiving support for Emoji 18.0 following the release of Noto 3D. Not only did it receive Emoji 18.0 support, but several existing emoji designs were also updated.
📰 News
Windows 11 Now Supports Emoji 17.0 🪟🆕
While Emoji 18.0 has been approved and is getting a lot of focus in this edition of the Emoji Wrap, we’re not completely done with last year’s Emoji 17.0 recommendations just yet.
Last month Microsoft began rolling out support for Emoji 17.0 via Windows 11 Release Preview updates, ahead of the wider 26H2 release later this year. If this cadence continues, we can expect to see the likes of the Cracking Face and the Lighthouse on Windows devices around this time next year.
Honor Emoji Set Now On Emojipedia ⚪🖼️
Earlier this year, Chinese manufacturer Honor debuted its own custom emoji set via a MagicOS 10 update, with the designs now archived on Emojipedia. The new designs cover a subset of several hundred emoji up to 2023’s Emoji 15.1 list, including all smileys, hearts, and most gestures and body parts.
Honor has therefore joined Samsung and Huawei as one of the few Android device makers still investing in its own native emoji designs, a trend that’s mostly gone the other way since the mid-2010s.
Google Debuts Noto 3D Emoji Overhaul on Pixel 11 🤖📲
While slightly old news given our coverage of Google’s Emoji 18.0 support above, last month Google officially launched the Pixel 11 range alongside a complete 3D overhaul of the Noto Color Emoji set, first previewed at Android I/O in May. No new emojis appeared in this launch, but they were revealed following the approval of Unicode 18.0 last week, alongside a variety of refinements to this initial release.
😭 or 😂: Do Your Emojis Make You Look Old?
Last month The New York Times dug into Google‘s Gboard usage data, comparing emoji popularity year over year and pairing it with a dig through Reddit to map out the generational fault lines running through your keyboard. The headline finding: 😭 has overtaken both 🤣 and 😂 as the most popular emoji worldwide (a trend we at Emojipedia noted occurring on Twitter back in 2021, albeit only for a time).
Gboard starts rolling out new ‘Emoji size’ setting 🐁🐘
Arriving alongside the Pixel 11 launch, Gboard beta users are getting a new “Emoji size” slider tucked under Settings > Preferences > Appearance, right beneath the existing font size control. It lets you set both the size and number of emoji shown per row, ranging from 9 down to 5, with a live preview built in.
💭 Interesting
The wilting rose emoji: what its rise and fall tells us about gen Alpha 💔🥀
A deep dive into the 🥀 Wilted Flower emoji, the fastest-growing emoji of 2025 according to the aforementioned Gboard data and almost entirely a Gen Alpha phenomenon. It’s used as a knowing, ironic replacement for the 💔 Broken Heart emoji, which was declared “too mainstream” by TikTok’s JuggTok community back in early 2025, leading to the rise of 🥀, which we ourselves noted in June 2025 on the Emojipedia blog.
🤗 Lastly
That does it for our latest edition of the Emoji Wrap! 🌯📯
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