🙌🏾

February 24, 2018 7:01 AM

First look: All 150+ Emojis for 2018 [YouTube] “The final emoji list for 2018 has now been published, and we here at Emojipedia have created images to show how we think these might look! 🙌 All 157 new emojis for 2018 are in this video, and we created our designs in an Apple-like style. Popular additions include redheads, curly hair, softball, kangaroo, and more. All humans support skin tones. The list for Emoji 11.0 was finalized on February 7, 2018 and these emojis should hit phones in the second half of 2018.”

• The Newest Emoji Say as Much About Us as Actual Words [Wired]

““We’re at a stage where there’s a fair few emoji out there. I think [the new emoji] are just a matter of rounding out the list a little,” says Jeremy Burge, the head of Emojipedia, who also vice-chairs the subcommittee at Unicode that chooses new emoji. “What’s left that people are obviously wanting and will obviously use? Hopefully this fills in some gaps there.” [...] "It parallels some of the ways that early ideographs were used," says Mark Davis, the president and co-founder of Unicode. If you look at emoji now, he says, they're almost all nouns. No adjectives, very few verbs. It's almost impossible to describe, using emoji, concepts like higher or lower, slower or faster, better or worse. "I can’t say something is heavy or light. I could use a mouse or an elephant to convey that, but that could be confusing."”

• Is the red stiletto emoji sexist? Here’s the backstory of the new women’s shoe icon. [The Washington Post]

“It was a red stiletto. “I just kind of stared at it in total disbelief,” she said. Not a big emoji user, she tapped onto the other icons to see what kinds of footwear existed, and her heart sank. “I realized that all three women’s shoes had high heels.” It felt wrong to let that stand. She decided two myths needed bashing — “One: that here in the crucible of technology that technology is totally immune to gender bias,” she said. “There’s a sense that binary numbers and coding is bias-free, but coders are human, and their biases go into technology.” The other myth was that all women wear high heels. [...] Working with graphic artist Aphee Messer, who has designed other emoji (including hijab, mosquito, lotus position, cupcake and receipt), Hutchinson came up with a blue ballet flat with a small bow near the toe. She submitted it in July and mentioned it to no one, not even her husband. In August, she learned that her proposal had been shortlisted. In the fall, the #MeToo movement hit, and suddenly the flat shoe seemed like a good idea to everyone. National magazines, radio commentators, fashion critics and Ellen DeGeneres were talking about Hutchinson’s crusade. “It just got the wind of all these women behind it,” she said.”

• It doesn’t matter how many legs the new lobster emoji has [Popular Science]

“Sometime later this year, 157 new emojis will grace your phone or computer, and one of them will be a lobster. That tiny little image could tell someone you’ve got a hankering for steamed crustaceans, that you’re wicked sunburned, or that you’re being boiled alive (ouch). The news made a U.S. senator happy: Angus King—he represents Maine, naturally—had officially asked the Unicode Consortium (more on them in a bit) for the lobster pictogram. But when a website called Emojipedia published a mock-up of what the shellfish would look like, there was a problem: It was short two legs. That lack of legs caused “outrage,” according to the Portland Press Herald, who admittedly may have been using that word playfully. But impassioned lobster-lovers (check out this proposal for the emoji’s inclusion to get a buttery taste of their fervor) definitely noticed the incorrect leg count. And so, on Monday, Emojipedia copped to making “some mistakes” and announced it was adding the requisite legs to the arthropod emoji, bringing its appendage total up to the proper 10.”

• Samsung is finally updating its terrible emoji [The Verge]

“Samsung has had a bad rap when it comes to emoji. Aesthetically speaking, they’re pretty fug, and worse, the yellow globs often don’t correspond with emoji on other platforms. So sometimes you’d be sending what you thought was a shocked face, but would really show up as a hungry face instead. [...] The new emoji won’t have an angled, tilted face, and almost all of the facial expressions have been tweaked. Some animal icons like the cat emoji have also changed colors to be more streamlined with other operating systems, and changes have been made to popular emoji like the nail polish hand, man dancing, and alien. More importantly, the update solves this sacrilegious mistake of Samsung representing chocolate chip cookie emoji as crackers. There are still a number of divergences, though, including the men / women with bunny ears emoji which show up on Samsung as one person rather than two.”

• Redheads Are *Finally* Getting Their Own Emoji, & Twitter Is Lit [Romper]

“There has been a lot of push for Unicode to create a redhead emoji — one petition, published to website, Change.org, garnered over 21,000 signatures begging Unicode to make the change. And last year, it was announced that a redhead emoji would be coming eventually if the ideas were approved, according to the Daily Mail. But now the time has finally arrived and the preview of the 12 fire-haired emojis look pretty amazing. It really is about time that these redheads are graced with their own emoji. After all, according to Cosmopolitan, approximately 140 million people in the world have red hair (that's 2 percent of the world's population). And the diversity among skin tones with redheads matters — red hair can occur in any ethnicity, according to Cosmopolitan (although red hair is a little more common in people of northern or Eastern European ethnicity).”

• Why Is Emoji Black Santa Sad? [Select/All]

“He seems, in fact, sad. His mouth, under the mustache, is definitely not smiling. There is something heavy — weary, even — in his brow. When we brought it up to graphic-design guru Debbie Millman, she said, “I think this comes from a combination of the skin-color contrast, the mustache, the eyebrows, and the eyes. First, the skin contrast: There is more contrast in all the elements of black Santa’s face. That’s just plain old optical color theory at work. White hair next to white skin isn’t seen as prominently as white hair next to black skin, etc. Next, look at Santa’s eyes: I call this the ‘Shih-Tzu effect.’ Shih-Tzu’s eyes look more human and emotional than most dogs because you can see more white around the pupils than in any other breed. The whites around black Santa’s eyes are more pronounced (again because of contrast) and make him look more human and emotional.”

posted by Fizz (39 comments total)

Every time I read about Emoji, I am reminded of the distant-future human descendants in Greg Bear’s Eon, who communicate in part by using BCIs that project holographic symbols into the air around them (I think — it might have also been mind-to-mind but I last read it 10+ years ago). In any case, the Cold War ended for a while, nobody built an asteroid-time-machine-singularity-tube, but we did get picting!
posted by Alterscape at 7:15 AM on February 24, 2018 [1 favorite]

this isn't going to die is it
posted by thelonius at 7:16 AM on February 24, 2018 [8 favorites]

😐
posted by glonous keming at 7:22 AM on February 24, 2018

They are adding a Skateboard and Pirate Flag, I need no other emoji.
posted by Annika Cicada at 7:25 AM on February 24, 2018 [6 favorites]

There's a llama emoji, so I'm OK with this.
posted by LMGM at 7:34 AM on February 24, 2018 [1 favorite]

All humans support skin tones.

I oppose skin tones.
posted by GCU Sweet and Full of Grace at 7:37 AM on February 24, 2018 [9 favorites]

We have emoji skintones, but we just have a plain emoji bagel? Where's the everything and wheat and pumpernickel?
posted by box at 7:37 AM on February 24, 2018 [6 favorites]

Are they ever going to improve the organization system for emoji? Right now I have to skim through pages of several hundred pictographs to find the one I want; there's no implementation for drill-down, tags or direct search. And it's only going to get worse with each update.
posted by Faint of Butt at 7:43 AM on February 24, 2018 [4 favorites]

Great. Now I have that fucking badger song stuck in my head again. 😠

(Also fucking magnets, how do they work?)
posted by sexyrobot at 7:46 AM on February 24, 2018 [6 favorites]

They are adding a Skateboard and Pirate Flag, I need no other emoji.

Um...did u not see the safety pin one?
posted by sexyrobot at 7:48 AM on February 24, 2018 [3 favorites]

How the Appetite for Emojis Complicates the Effort to Standardize the World’s Alphabets (from Oct 2017).
posted by Nelson at 8:13 AM on February 24, 2018 [5 favorites]

Yeah this feels like the number where we need a better organization system immediately. Messages on the Mac allows you to text search, which makes them much more usable. I didn't really care for any cartoon face ones, but I loved seeing the leg for some reason.
posted by little onion at 8:13 AM on February 24, 2018 [1 favorite]

I can see I'm missing out on the plentiful journalistic and scholarly opportunities this pointless orgy offers. Best start pitching...

"Legume lovers outrage at lack of plate of beans emoji"

"Beanless bruhaha - emoji overemphasis on meat theatens environment"

"No 57 in emojis' infinite variety: semiotic substitution informs cultural hardening in transformational narratives and dietary virue signalling"
posted by Devonian at 8:58 AM on February 24, 2018 [3 favorites]

Still no fucking emoji of a person using a wheelchair?! MOTHERFUCK!?
I don't have a dog in this race but this enrages me, I want to make an application for a wheelchair user emoji, but I don't want to go trampling in on someone else's cause, but maybe I should anyhow, cos this is another set of emoji and we've got both mermen and mermaids, but noone in a wheelchair. Any pixelgraphic artists want in? Memail me.
posted by Iteki at 9:42 AM on February 24, 2018 [13 favorites]

Was it just me who wondered at the juxtaposition between the emoji for DNA and it’s slidemate, lotion? No?
posted by 41swans at 9:45 AM on February 24, 2018

> Why Is Emoji Black Santa Sad?

This article opens with a checkerboard of White and Black Santa and (🎅🏼, 🎅🏿) and honestly, at large sizes, White Santa looks pretty sad too. Also Yellow Santa is creepy: 🎅

(This article seems to only be concerned with Apple’s emoji; their image looks exactly like what I’m getting on my iPad. I wonder if other companies’ Santas look sad.)

Also this reminds me that someday I should find Apple’s bug report form to report the one I found with OSX’s character palette - like iOS, you can click and hold on an emoji to select skin tone variants. But once you’ve done this is is permanently stuck on that skin tone; clicking and holding only works on the yellow emoji.
posted by egypturnash at 10:02 AM on February 24, 2018

I wonder if the Unicode Consortium ever envisioned back in the early 90s that they'd have such an impact on people's lives like this. They're kingmakers now.
posted by msbutah at 10:14 AM on February 24, 2018 [1 favorite]

If I can press down on a person emoji to select skin tones, I should be able to press down on the cat to select from ginger, tabby, tuxedo, and others. Someone make this happen.
posted by BuddhaInABucket at 11:06 AM on February 24, 2018 [13 favorites]

Um...did u not see the safety pin one?

/me has a happy attack of joy.
posted by Annika Cicada at 12:33 PM on February 24, 2018 [1 favorite]

🤔Hmm..🤔
posted by Freelance Demiurge at 12:57 PM on February 24, 2018 [3 favorites]

Finally a tooth! Still no toothbrush... It’s like a conspiracy against dental care.
posted by rikschell at 1:17 PM on February 24, 2018

ok this is super petty but apparently the way to differentiate a bald woman from a bald man is to move all the facial features down and giving her a bigger forehead? that seems wrong to me.
posted by numaner at 1:34 PM on February 24, 2018

but ok we got Badger now so my Hufflepuff self is cool with this
posted by numaner at 1:36 PM on February 24, 2018

My emoji-finding resource is getemoji.com, not perfect but more convenient than most.

Still dissatisfied over the absence of Otter (not even its ne'er do well cousin, the Weasel) and Squirrel (redirects to Chipmunk? No!).
posted by oneswellfoop at 2:09 PM on February 24, 2018

Are they ever going to improve the organization system for emoji? Right now I have to skim through pages of several hundred pictographs to find the one I want; there's no implementation for drill-down, tags or direct search. And it's only going to get worse with each update.

I don't know if it's my phone (Moto G4) or if it's WhatsApp (the only place I use emojis), but it gives me the option to scribble the emoji I'm looking for, and it's actually really good at interpreting what I'm trying to draw.
posted by lollymccatburglar at 2:31 PM on February 24, 2018

I'm stupidly excited for red-haired emoji.

I also imagine I'll get a lot of use out of woozy face, tooth, amoeba, petri dish, and the nazar (evil eye ward) just because that last one is such a useful one-character reaction -- someone says something possibly jinx-y by text, and you quickly shoot back a nazar to ward off their jinxy ways!
posted by Eyebrows McGee at 4:07 PM on February 24, 2018 [2 favorites]

Why is the softball tennis-ball-yellow?

Did anyone else notice the evolution of the gun emojii in the last few months? Originally in iOS it was a realistic looking handgun but at some point in December Facebook friends and I noticed that the gun had turned into a brightly-colored plastic gun with a red tip on it in the iOS FB app, but was still the original gun on the FB website. Now the gun seems to be consistently the toy gun. 🔫

Note: very small sample size, all on FB and almost all Apple devices and OSes.
posted by bendy at 4:26 PM on February 24, 2018

So am I the only one excited that there will now be both a lotion emoji AND a basket emoji?

🤫🐑🍽️🍷

eh? eh?
posted by offalark at 5:04 PM on February 24, 2018 [5 favorites]

There are two types of people in this world, those who call them "emoji" and those who call them "emojis."
posted by hexaflexagon at 7:25 PM on February 24, 2018 [2 favorites]

According to Emojipedia, Apple, Samsung and Whatsapp use a toy for the gun icon, while most companies use a real weapon. Which seems like it would cause some pretty bad miscommunications.

And this is an example of why I feel emojis are becoming shit for communication.
posted by MikeKD at 7:36 PM on February 24, 2018 [1 favorite]

there's no implementation for drill-down, tags or direct search. And it's only going to get worse with each update.

On a Mac, Edit > Emoji & Symbols has a direct search. On an iPhone (and some Android phones) you can type the word and it'll come up as autocomplete suggestions.
posted by grahamparks at 8:45 PM on February 24, 2018

> Every time I read about Emoji, I am reminded of the distant-future human descendants in Greg Bear’s Eon, who communicate in part by using BCIs that project holographic symbols into the air around them

Yes! I remember thinking that was such a cool, far future idea at the time, and now half of the messages I send are gifs.
posted by lucidium at 8:39 AM on February 25, 2018 [1 favorite]

Alterscape: "In any case, the Cold War ended for a while, nobody built an asteroid-time-machine-singularity-tube, but we did get picting!"

I think the Stone is actually built a millennium or so from now, and gets sent back to the novel's present?
posted by Chrysostom at 9:36 PM on February 25, 2018

The superhero and supervillain ones get further away from universals and into the specific, especially the supervillain. They're references to a bunch of pop-cultural/media signifiers in a certain timespan (namely, the comic books of the mid-20th century and their long echoes), which at some point will look quaint, and then, after that, just odd. (One can make the same claim about the Aladdin-Sane-meets-Prince “rock star” emoji; had emoji existed in the 90s, it'd probably look like Elvis Presley or someone, though now that'd be ridiculous. At some point, the people who recognise Bowie and Prince will have passed on and this will look just as quaint.)

Perhaps, if emoji needs sets of signifiers anchored in specific periods, there should be modifier characters for periods, or even some kind of wildcard syntax. I.e., choose “SUPERViLLAIN” and the mid-20th-century modifier and get some kind of Lex-Luthor-meets-Blofeld underground-lair guy; replace it with an early-20th-century modifier, and you get the moustachioed rogue who ties damsels in distress to railway tracks in silent movies. Choose “SUPERHERO” and add the “ancient world” modifier and you get Hercules or Achilles or someone.
posted by acb at 6:31 AM on February 26, 2018

i mean fundamentally they are just code points. so if in the future people think a 12-eyed alien better represents a rock star, the fonts can switch to that, and the old Bowie emoji will just be an archaic way of writing the same character, like seal script or something.

i like the idea of extremely elaborate sets of modifiers though.
posted by vogon_poet at 9:54 AM on February 26, 2018

It mystifies me, that, given the precious few concepts permitted representation as emoji, the designers of the existing set saw fit to squander an extra slot to adequately represent the full splendor of camels - there are separate emoji for both Dromedary (one hump) and Bactrian (two hump) camels.

Contrast with dogs, of which there are hundreds of dissimilar looking breeds, but which are represented by, at most, three emoji (including the head-on dog face one).
posted by Aubergine at 2:20 PM on February 26, 2018

There doesn't seem to be any sort of system to how emojis are chosen to be included; they're like an absurd list out of a Borges story. There are emoji for mouse and rat and chipmunk and hamster and raccoon and deer and fox and badger and hedgehog, i.e., pretty much every mammal you might encounter in a city, yet for birds there's just 'bird' (where is the 'mammal' emoji) and then like ten different chicken variants. Where are sparrow, pigeon, gull, and crow?
posted by Pyry at 9:02 PM on February 26, 2018 [1 favorite]

Early Unicode had a system; it only included characters that existed in real languages or in other coding systems for languages. The first emoji were included explicitly as a way to standardize various Japanese emoji sets (particularly Docomo) to facilitate interoperability and translation between systems; the very purpose of Unicode. Unfortunately that guiding principle has long since gone by the wayside and now the process is some unruly mix of individual advocacy, corporate interests, and whimsy. The article I linked awhile back goes into some detail.
posted by Nelson at 12:16 PM on February 27, 2018

Just learned about 🕴, AKA Walt Jabsco, who was an exclamation mark on the cover of a ska album and ended up as an emoji through a series of historical accidents.
posted by vogon_poet at 5:14 PM on February 27, 2018