Emoji Season is Open 🏃‍➡️

Less of “What’s missing?” and more “What is indispensable?”

As the emoji keyboard matures, the criteria for what earns a permanent spot on our devices is evolving from “What’s missing?” to “What is indispensable?” In the early days, we had roughly 700 emoji. Today, we’re nearing 4,000. While more emoji feels like a win it has simultaneously made using and creating new emoji significantly harder. Despite thousands of options, a mere handful (😂❤️😍🤣😊) represent a quarter of all emoji use.

And yet, today the Emoji Standard and Research Working Group stands before you with open arms officially accepting 2026’s emoji submissions. Before you hit submit, here are some things to take in consideration.

The Swiss Army Knife vs. The Single-Use Plastic Knife

If your proposal identifies a missing noun, it’s already behind the curve. Adding hyper-specific objects like a niche tool, a specific household object, or a rare animal creates a long tail problem: more clutter with less actual utility. The “Noun Era” of emoji was an important era but will never be complete and isn’t sustainable.

Pro-Tip: Aim for semantic density. We need symbols that work like a Swiss Army Knife: versatile enough to be used in ten different ways, not just one. The Pig Face 🐷 is a masterclass in utility. It’s a literal animal, a symbol for hunger, a nod to the Lunar New Year, or a cheeky warning that the cops are nearby.

The Burden of Immortality

A technical truth often overlooked is that Unicode is forever. I wish the mere presence of a DVD emoji 📀 secured its relevancy into the future (I miss those Director's commentaries), but alas, it sits in our keyboards and at Goodwill collecting cobwebs.

Every encoded emoji is a permanent addition to our global digital footprint and “tax” on our devices’ memory and keyboard real estate. Unlike an app, Unicode characters are not removed after they have been encoded.

Pro Tip: Resist the "Brand Ambassador" mindset. Specific nouns are wonderful for stickers and GIFs since they are the ‘slang’ of the internet. If it’s “very 2026” it is probably too early to get inducted into the permanent collection. Think about what the world was using a thousand years ago, today, and will continue to use in 2128.

This Most Frequently Used Emoji chart is insane but so is the fact that only a ~5 emoji represent 25% of all emoji use. Source: Unicode.org

The Interoperability Check

Interoperability is why Unicode makes emoji in the first place. They are here to make sure we see the same symbols on every screen so when you send a butterfly 🦋 it doesn’t mysteriously change from a monarch to a morpho or vice versa. Does your emoji solve a long standing Interoperability problem? Don’t just look for aesthetic differences; provide evidence of miscommunication.

Pro-tip: Not all problems can be solved by adding a new emoji and research can help determine the severity of the problem. It doesn’t hurt to consult reports published by the ESR. While a teapot 🫖 that is red on one phone and white on another, there isn’t evidence that this is significantly impacting the selection of this emoji. However, get a load of this whimsical comet that looks like a psychopathic fireball on another device.

Can you spell your emoji?

Before you spend twenty hours researching a "nervous breakdown” emoji, ask yourself: Can I already "spell" this? If your idea can be communicated by a combination of two existing emoji, it likely doesn’t need to be a new character but it does make for a cute text. 🤸🕳️

Pro-tip: Ask yourself if your emoji is atomic. Is the idea so foundational it cannot be broken down into smaller parts?¹

Provide Evidence, not Anecdotes

You don’t need to work for a messaging app to have data! Use Google Trends. All proposals need to include search query screenshots to help illustrate if people are searching for your emoji concept more than they are searching for a median performing emoji.

Pro-tip: Compare your idea to the 'benchmark' emoji (elephant 🐘) to lend some credence to its value. Don’t just tell us people want it: show us the data.

What’s next?

After you submit, you’ll be notified before the end of the year (November-ish) if your proposal has advanced to the next stage; however, if your proposal is declined, I know it will come as a disappointment. 💕 For what it’s worth, there are loads of reasons why proposals are declined, including:

• ➕ It can be represented by a sequence. (Ex. Hand washing 🤲🧼💧)

• 🔍 It’s too specific. We can’t add every type of flower, every hairstyle, or every breed of dog no matter how cute they are. ;-)

• 🔥 Lack of metaphorical depth” (i.e., it only means one thing).

• 💰 Scarcity. Very few are selected. Very few.

• 🐣 It’s a transient concept. Think “stable, long-standing concepts” rather than “memes.”

As emoji enter their second decade in the Unicode Standard, it’s a good time to acknowledge how far we have come since those first four mailboxes 📫📪📬📭 since they continue to haunt us in our keyboards. Reconciling the rapid, transient nature of modern communication with the formal, methodical process required by a standards body like the Unicode Consortium is the name of the game these days. Until we can send any image in the world alongside text messages and not just code points …. well, Unicode is here for the world’s emoji related needs. 💖

---

Remain committed to making your proposal the best it can be? Some further reading and videos on this topic include: How to write a successful proposal and how to write the worst proposal. If you’re drafting a document, I encourage you to familiarize yourself with the criteria for inclusion and the criteria for exclusion.

1. If you’re asking yourself “What about ZWJs??” … that’s more of a technical feasibility not a criteria for exclusion. ;-)