What’s up, besties? It’s World Emoji Day, which means it’s time to look at some new emoji (or is that emojis?). In a post on its blog today, the Unicode Consortium, the nonprofit behind the standardized set of emoji across you see across all your various devices and apps, previewed its next set of icons and expressions. The group says there’s still “a lot of paperwork” to do on these, so they might not hit your phones and tablets until sometime around 2026, according to an email Unicode’s Erik Thompson sent to The Verge.
But what a batch it is: We’ve got a musical instrument. We’ve got treasure. We’ve got one of those old-school cartoon fight clouds. And of course, we’ve got a cryptid. While new emoji have proven surprisingly political in the past, this update seems more focused on crowd-pleasers, and I’d say it’s doing a good job of it.
The list below isn’t everything from the final Unicode 17.0 release, but this is what we know of so far:
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Trombone
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Treasure Chest
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Distorted Face
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Hairy Creature
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Fight Cloud
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Apple Core
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Orca
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Ballet Dancers
Credit: The Unicode Consortium
Personally, my favorite is probably the orca (I love a cetacean), but I want to give special attention to “Distorted Face.” It kinda looks like an extreme .5 selfie, but if you watch any amount of anime, there’s a good chance you’ve seen it before—it looks a lot like that one downward angle, fish eye close up shot that a lot of directors use to show a character in the middle of a mental breakdown. So, you know, use it when the fast food place forgets your curly fries or whatever.
I should also probably say what we’re all thinking: Yes, “Hairy Creature” is Bigfoot, right down to the pose. I’m not sure what if there are copyright concerns for a character like that (it should be public domain, but “Bigfoot” is also a brand name), but it’s not the first time the Unicode Consortium has been purposefully vague when making a deliberate reference. The Goblin emoji, for instance, actually depicts a Tengu mask, a real-life part of Japanese culture that itself represents a being from Japanese folklore.
Then there are the “Ballet Dancers.” We only see one in the preview, but given how emoji have depicted different jobs and hobbies in the past, we’re likely to get a few iterations of this basic design at launch.
In the meantime, the Unicode Consortium is actually encouraging you to send in your own proposals for emoji. Just know that it may take a while for an idea to get approved, and that you’ll need to go through your own mountain of paperwork first.
