Some emojis are cooler than others – just ask Gen Z about laugh-cry – but new ones are always a cause for celebration.
This isn’t just because they give us more options in the girlies‘ group chat, but also because emojis can play their part in improving representation. The rollout of new emojis was temporarily put on hold during the pandemic, so we’re especially excited about the latest batch.
They include an afro comb emoji, a shaking face and a Khanda, the symbol of the Sikh religion. Also in the pipeline: a plain pink heart emoji, which looks set to be a super-popular addition.
In a blog post announcing the new emojis, Emojipedia‘s Editor-in-Chief Keith Broni writes: “This has been one of the most discussed absences on the emoji keyboard for many years, with a pink heart being amongst our own assessments of the most popular emoji requests since 2016.”
this is 2021 and we still don’t have a normal pink heart emoji pic.twitter.com/Lm0UDuOv6b
— ً (@SpookyGothLoser) September 27, 2021
Turquoise and pale grey heart emojis are also coming soon, as are leftwards and rightwards pushing hands in a range of skin tones. New wildlife emojis include a goose, moose, jellyfish and donkey.
Musicians will welcome the addition of maracas and flute emojis, while home cooks will enjoy being able to use a ginger root emoji. After all, it’s the base of so many great-tasting dishes.
All of the new emojis have been created by Emojipedia, but the final decision on whether they’ll actually be implemented is still to be made by Unicode Consortium.
“As this is only a draft emoji list, each emoji is subject to change prior to final approval in September 2022,” Emojipedia’s Keith Broni writes. “However, it is worth noting the majority of draft emoji candidates have ended up included on the final list over the last number of years.”
In fact, every single emoji put forward in 2021 was approved, so we should be dropping cute pink hearts into the group chat very, very soon.
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