A Shaking Face, two pushing hands, and a plain Pink Heart. These are just some of the emojis that are up for approval this September. Ahead of World Emoji Day, Emojipedia has created sample designs for each candidate emoji. While some might not make the cut, most presented for approval are historically confirmed.
Other inclusions on the Emoji 15.0 draft list alongside Shaking Face and Pink Heart are Light Blue Heart, Grey Heart, Donkey, Jellyfish, Hair Pick, and a Khanda - the symbol of the Sikh faith.
The Emojipedia Sample Images shown above are just one way in which these emojis might look, created by Emojipedia's Head of Emoji Design Joshua Jones.
This is our eighth year of providing sample emoji designs ahead of their official arrival on emoji keyboards.
Actual vendor designs will vary from those released by major vendors, and Emojipedia's own sample images may also be updated when Emoji 15.0 final is released.
Additionally, as this is only a draft emoji list, each emoji is subject to change prior to final approval in September 2022.
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 - including every emoji we previewed from last year's Emoji 14.0 draft list ahead of World Emoji Day 2021.
What's in the latest draft emoji list, and when it is scheduled for approval https://t.co/yemIEzDfKi
— Emojipedia 📆🏆 (@Emojipedia) July 15, 2021
So what that in mind, and with the sample designs above as a guide, which of the draft Emoji 15.0 emojis are you most looking forward to? You can vote for your favorite in the Most Anticipated Emoji category as part of the 2022 World Emoji Awards.
This isn't a part of the approval process, just a fun way to gauge which draft emojis people are most keen to use. So get voting, and the winner will be revealed ahead of World Emoji Day!
Speaking of World Emoji Day, in case you missed in over the last number of days:
- 📈 We have revealed that global emoji use has never been higher
- 🟢 We collaborated with WhatsApp as they expanded their emoji reaction feature, outlining the meaning behind some popular emoji trends
- 🌐 We've added language supports for Spanish, French, Portuguese, Germany, and Italian to Emojipedia
For additional information about the Emoji 15.0 draft list, you can review the Unicode 15.0 draft release notes, and Emoji 15.0 beta page. The latter includes recommended keywords and proposal documents. We do have some of our own observations, however.
🔍 New (Draft) Emoji Observations
While, again, the list is still in draft, there are a few observations we can make about the emojis that may well be arriving on our emoji keyboards later this year.
Firstly, Emoji 15.0 is likely to deliver upon a long-request emoji: a plain Pink Heart.
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.
im never gonna stop talking about how beneficial a pink heart emoji would be
— liz🌺🌾 (@lithilizieI) July 11, 2022
this is 2021 and we still don’t have a normal pink heart emoji pic.twitter.com/Lm0UDuOv6b
— ً (@SpookyGothLoser) September 27, 2021
I won't be impressed with an iPhone update until there is finally just a regular plain pink heart emoji 🙄
— Krissy (@krissyrivard) September 16, 2016
Isn't there already a pink heart, we hear some of you ask? Yes and no. In short, this will be a completely plain pink heart without additional adornments or features, that are defined by its color alone: think along the lines of 🧡 Orange Heart, 💛 Yellow Heart, 💚 Green Heart, and 💙 Blue Heart.
The second observation is that this is a much smaller number of new emojis than has been the case in recent years.
The draft list for Emoji 15.0 contains only 31 recommended emojis, while 2021's Emoji 14.0 contained 112 recommendations, while 2020's Emoji 13.0 and Emoji 13.1 contained 334 between them (117 and 217, respectively).
In fact, it is the smallest number of new emojis that Unicode has ever recommended at any one time since before the "Emoji Version" numbering began.
Additionally, for the first time ever, there are no new people emojis in this batch of recommendations.
This does come, however, after people emojis have constituted a majority of the last three batches of emoji recommendations. And that's without counting the different body parts and gesture emojis.
2019's Emoji 12.1 was exclusively people emojis: a series of zero width joiner sequences that added gender-neutral variants of the different profession/role emojis from 2016's Emoji 4.0 and the hairstyles from 2018's Emoji 11.0, as well as expanding upon the different 🧑🤝🧑 People Holding Hands emojis first added in Emoji 12.0 earlier the same year.
Meanwhile, 2020's Emoji 13.1, which on its own added 212 different variations of existing people emojis - either gender-neutral variants or combinations that supported multiple skin tone options of the 💏 Kiss and 💑 Couple with Heart emojis.
Some final other miscellaneous thoughts:
- The new Donkey emoji will mean that the animal mascots of both major political parties in the United States of America will have emoji versions (joining the 🐘 Elephant emoji).
- The Rightwards Pushing Hand and Leftwards Pushing Hand should have great combinational power with other emojis - and maybe even with each other to create an actual high five emoji.
- The new Black Bird emoji joins 🐈⬛ Black Cat and 🐻❄️ Polar Bear as color-based variations on existing emoji animals, implemented via zero width joiner (ZWJ) sequences.
- Amusingly, the codepoint of the Moose emoji is "FACE" (U+1FACE). Whether or not vendors decide to show just its head like our Emojipedia Sample Image or display the full-bodied creature will have to be seen.
🗓 Emoji Timeline
When will you get the new emojis on your iPhone, Pixel, or other devices and platforms? There are two parts to this:
- It is yet to be confirmed which emojis are in the final version of Emoji 15.0 - as we've said above, this is still a draft list. However, based on recent years, the final version is likely to resemble this draft list. This means that no new emojis will be added at this stage, though there's a slight chance that a draft emoji candidate is changed or removed ahead of September.
- Release dates for emoji support always vary by the operating system, app, or device.
With those two things in mind, here's our estimated timeline for Emoji 15.0's approval and release across major emoji vendors.
Expect to see some companies come out with early emoji support in late 2022, and the majority of updates to take place in the first half of 2023.
Here's when each vendor began to support (or began to preview) last year's Emoji 14.0 recommendations.
- 27 October 2021: Google Noto Color Emoji, via Android 12L beta (since released to Android 12/12L, Gmail, YouTube, and other Google platforms)
- 16 February 2022: Microsoft, via Windows 11 Insider Beta (still in beta - released expected in fall 2022)
- March 2022: Twitter, via Twemoji 14.0
- March 2022: Apple, via iOS 15.4
- 19 April 2022: WhatsApp, via 2.22.8.79
- 20 April 2022: Facebook (including Messenger)
- 29 April 2022: Noto Emoji Font (upon initial launch)
- 5 July 2022: Openmoji, via Openmoji 14.0
- 9 July 2022: Samsung, via One UI 5.0 beta (expected fall 2022)
- 19 July 2022: JoyPixels 7.0 to be released