The new emoji coming this year include broccoli, a T. rex and this oddly sexy insect
Good news, mermaids and mermen: Your emoji are officially coming this year.
Unicode, the organization that standardizes characters across devices, released its final list of 2017 emoji on Monday. There are 56 new emoji—69 if you count gender variations—and they're really all over the place. You'll be able to use new gender-neutral people, broccoli, mermaids, a Tyrannosaurus rex and a cricket with incredibly strong, beautiful legs:
"Today is the first time we know that these are confirmed as the emojis for 2017," Jeremy Burge, the founder of Emojipedia and a member of Unicode's Emoji Subcommittee, said via direct message on Twitter. "No more🤞🤞🤞 that an emoji makes the cut. If it's in this list, it's final."
"I do not think the cricket's legs are sexy, for what it's worth," he added.
Emojipedia creates its own mock-ups of the approved emoji list based on how they're likely to appear on iOS. These aren't final designs, in other words, but they do represent emoji that are absolutely coming later this year. (It's likely that the cricket will be less ripped.)
It's also possible that the controversial "sauna" people—naked individuals holding menacing spoons—will look different.
Those sauna emoji were actually proposed by the Ministry for Foreign Affairs of Finland ("Sauna is practically a holy place in Finland where there exists around 3.2 million saunas for 5.4 million people," it wrote), and they were much more suggestive in their original iteration:
Just because Unicode approves an emoji doesn't mean that a company like Apple will enable it on a device like the iPhone, but Burge said Apple and Google have both adopted 100 percent of new emoji releases so far.
Some of the new emoji are sort of curious—there's a whole suite of fantasy-themed characters, for instance:
And there are new smileys that seem a bit redundant—a barfing face right after we got a "sick" face last year, for example:
Burge said some of the decisions were made to standardize emoji that exist in some form already. For example, Facebook has long offered that starry-eyed smiley in its News Feed as part of the "Feeling/Activity" feature:
The full list is published on Emojipedia's website, though the group also made a video showing off all the new emoji. It's embedded above, if you're curious.
Topics iOS
Damon Beres is an Executive Editor at Mashable, overseeing tech and science coverage. Previously, he was Senior Tech Editor at The Huffington Post. His work has appeared in Reader's Digest, Esquire.com, the New York Daily News and other fine outlets.
