Every year, the Unicode consortium makes one of the hardest decisions in world politics: which new emojis to add to the official list used around the world.
This time the announcement is early – Unicode has revealed the next batch well before they’re due to actually show up on your phone, with the nine new icons likely to arrive in iOS 27.3 or 27.4 sometime next year if history is anything to go by. Apple will draw its own versions, as always, so what you see below won’t be exactly what lands on your iPhone.
So what’s new?
Top billing goes to a proper pickle emoji, which will be good news for pickle fans who were previously stuck with misusing the cucumber icon. There’s also a cracked smiling face, which is self-explanatory for anyone having a rough week.
Elsewhere, a monarch butterfly joins the existing blue morpho butterfly, while a lighthouse, meteor, net, eraser, and a pair of pointing thumbs join the roster. Handy for anyone who finds finger-pointing a bit rude.
Unicode’s Jennifer Daniel has been doing the press rounds explaining the reasoning – the meteor exists to separate “ball of fire” from the existing comet and shooting star icons, and the eraser is there for, in her words, “retroactive boundary-setting”. Make of that what you will.
Nine new emoji is a decent haul by recent standards, though as always, don’t expect to actually use any of them until both you and whoever you’re texting have updated.