Who doesn't love new emojis? Of course, we all use the classics, but can you imagine your digital life without Melting Face or Salute Face? (I certainly can't.) So it's always good news when you hear about new emojis being developed.
Before we get too carried away, these emojis aren't ready for prime time. Instead, it turns out that the Unicode Consortium, the organization that maintains the Unicode standards, released a short list of new emoji candidates for Unicode 16. The list contains seven new emoji and a new logo that, if approved, will be included in the rest of the Unicode 16 standard in future versions of iOS and Android. The iOS 18 version and Android 15 version are likely to get the following emojis:
There are bags under the eyes
fingerprint
leafless tree
root vegetables
harp
shovel
splash
Flag: Sark
I think among these eight types, the most commonly used one is "baggy face". Even Unicode's interpretation of emojis is interesting, so I'm looking forward to seeing how designers at Apple, Google, Samsung, and others take advantage of it. As for Sark, it’s a self-governing, car-free island located between England and France. I'm glad its population of 562 will soon have emojis of their flags.
Since these eight emojis are about to enter Unicode 16 beta, it's unclear when we'll actually see them accepted and appear on platforms like iOS and Android. The beta version itself will last until July 2nd. The last time we got an emoji update was in January: us iOS users got 6 new emojis in iOS 17.4, including the horizontal shaking head, vertical shaking head, phoenix, lime, brown mushroom, and broken link. To be honest, I'm not sure I've used one of these since they came out. (I guess I’m not shaking my head enough.)
