Fresh emoji are heading to a digital keyboard near you. After a six-month delay, Unicode 14.0 unveiled 37 icons (112 including skin tone variants) expected to hit major platforms in late 2021 or early 2022.
As the collection grows, new additions become more incongruous. Rather than sets of food, animals, or activities, you’ll find a club-weilding troll, lotus flower, and playground slide launching alongside a car tire, disco ball, and beans. There’s also a pair of biting lips, an underwater coral, a bird’s nest (with and without eggs), liquid pouring from a glass, a nondescript jar, a ring buoy, the Hamsa amulet, bubbles, a single crutch, a cartoon X-ray, and an identification card. The “heavy equals sign” also rounds out an existing set of mathematical symbols.
What would a Unicode release be, though, without more smileys? This batch contains a melting face, face with peeking eye, saluting face, dotted-line face, face with diagonal mouth, and face holding back tears. The new face with open eyes and hand over mouth, meanwhile, aims to fix a cross-platform display issue with the existing face with hand over mouth.
While the current version, used by most major platforms, features “smiling eyes” that convey laughter, Apple and Facebook’s open eyes look like shock or surprise. A new character takes on the serious “open eyes” appearance, suggesting Facebook and Apple may introduce a contrasting smiling eyes option in the future.
Continuing its gender-fluid approach, Unicode added person with crown, pregnant man, and pregnant person, as well as a series of hands: rightwards, leftwards, palm down, palm up, hand with index finger and thumb crossed (also known as “finger heart”), index pointing at viewer, heart hands. And, for the first time, the handshake emoji will feature a combination of skin tones.
Previous iterations listed only the default yellow handshake, or a shared effect (i.e. black handshake, brown handshake, white handshake). With this update, you can choose from 25 difference sequences with varying shades of skin tone.
The oft-requested pink heart emoji has once again been left out of version 14.0, though fans are hopeful that it (along with gray and light blue alternatives), will make an appearance in the future. Expect to see some companies roll out support for new symbols later this year, while the majority of updates will take place in the first half of 2022.
