New Apple Emojis For 2026 - Apple iOS 26.4 Emoji Changelog
Today, as part of the public release of iOS 26.4, Apple has introduced designs for 163 new emojis, including a distorted face with bulging eyes, ballet dancers, a Bigfoot-inspired cryptid, an orca, and a treasure chest. The update also includes a revision to the Puerto Rican flag emoji.
Today, as part of the public release of iOS 26.4, Apple has introduced designs for 163 new emojis, including a distorted face with bulging eyes, ballet dancers, a Bigfoot-inspired cryptid, an orca, and a treasure chest. The update also includes a revision to the Puerto Rican flag emoji.
🆕 New in iOS 26.4
Of the 163 emojis officially debuting in iOS 26.4 (shown above), eight represent entirely new concepts added to the Apple emoji keyboard. A further five are skin tone variations for one of these new additions, while the remaining 150 are new skin tone combinations for the existing 🤼 People Wrestling and 👯 People With Bunny Ears emojis.
As first previewed in iOS 26.4 beta 4 earlier this month, the eight brand new emoji concepts to the Apple emoji keyboard are:
- Distorted Face
- Fight Cloud, as seen in cartoons and comic books
- 🧑🩰 Ballet Dancer (with five additional skin tone options)
- Orca, also known as a "killer whale"
- Hairy Creature, inspired by various global "Big Foot"-esque cryptids
- Trombone
- Landslide
- Treasure Chest
This update also includes subtle revisions to the designs of 🤼 People Wrestling and 👯 People With Bunny Ears, matching their 150 new skin tone combination options.
All 163 of these new emojis are drawn from Unicode's Emoji 17.0 recommendations, made last September alongside the release of Unicode 17.0.
These same new emojis are also available across Apple’s other platforms released today, including iPadOS 26.4, tvOS 26.4, watchOS 26.4, and macOS 26.4.
This is also Apple's first Unicode emoji update since the company shifted its versioning system to align with the calendar year.
📺😳 Is That Emoji From That Ad?
Upon these designs' initial reveal, the Distorted Face received a notable reaction, with some media outlets comparing the design to a prominent visual from Apple's controversial May 2024 "Crush" advertisement for the iPad Pro.
While the emoji was proposed to Unicode several months later in July 2024, that visual was not directly referenced.
The proposal, submitted by the Emoji Standard and Research Working Group chairperson Jennifer Daniel, frames the concept around the idea of inflation and physical expansion, in the vein of Violet Beauregarde's transformation in Charlie and the Chocolate Factory. Hence the originally proposed name "Inflatable Face", though it would be recommended under the name of "Distorted Face" come November 2024.
As shown above, the proposal included a design sourced from Google's Emoji Kitchen, first made available in October 2020 by combining two 😳 Flushed Face emojis.
In arguing for this new emoji addition, the proposal also outlined a wide range of distorted expressions, from bulging eyes to fish-eye lens-style distortions, drawing on cartoon and comic book conventions. As the proposal itself puts it:
It is a visual trope that is effective at communicating a remarkably broad range of things including surprise, turning into a ball, being filled with hot air (aka light) or filled with water (aka heavy and bloated), etc. It does so by not being overly specific.
Additionally, in a recent blog post, Daniel broadens the concept's scope further, citing artistic traditions of facial distortion as well as contemporary social trends such as the fisheye profile picture, suggesting that distortion as visual expression is both culturally deep-rooted and very much of the present moment.
👣🩰 Big Feet and Fleet of Foot
Two other emojis from the list of new concepts that received a notable response were the Hairy Creature and the 🧑🩰 Ballet Dancer.
The Hairy Creature takes its inspiration from the global family of "Big Foot"-style cryptids: large, hair-covered humanoid figures reported across many cultures. Like the designs from Google and WhatsApp, Apple's design mimics the posture seen in the famous still from the 1967 Patterson–Gimlin Bigfoot footage.
The 🧑🩰 Ballet Dancer, meanwhile, arrives as a gender-neutral addition, complementing the existing 🕺 Man Dancing (disco style) and 💃 Woman Dancing (performing flamenco in her iconic red dress).
The five skin tone sequence options for the 🧑🩰 Ballet Dancer also have a notable design detail: the footwear colour adjusts to match the selected skin tone, a considered touch given that ballet shoes conventionally come in a range of flesh tones.
Interestingly, a USA Today preview article published ahead of the release initially included an image showing a 🧑🩰 Ballet Dancer design that was more explicitly female in appearance.
This image, shown above, was later swapped out for one with the gender-neutral appearance that was officially implemented today.
Whether this reflects a late-stage design change on Apple's part is impossible to confirm, but it may offer an explanation for an otherwise puzzling detail: iOS 26.4 beta 3 included support for the new Emoji 17.0 codepoints within the keyboard and search functionality, despite the new designs themselves not yet being implemented.
🆙 Changed in iOS 26.4
The three previously-available 🤼 People Wrestling emoji options have been updated, with both people's posture and proportions modified. The 🤼♀️ Women Wrestling also had its two-stripe design on their singlets changed to a single stripe design, matching that of the 🤼♂️ Men Wrestling and 🤼 People Wrestling emojis.
The change for the 👯 People With Bunny Ears emojis is even more subtle, with the shadowing behind their bunny ear headband being slightly tweaked.
The 🇵🇷 Flag: Puerto Rico emoji has had its colors made lighter, better reflecting the flag's contemporary colors (Puerto Rico officially adopted the lighter blue in its 1952 constitution).
Most other vendors have depicted the flag with this lighter blue previously, making this a relatively rare instance of Apple converging to the design norm of others.
📲 Release
iOS 26.4 is available now as a free software update for the following Apple devices:
- iPhone 17 / iPhone 17 Pro / iPhone 17 Pro Max
- iPhone 16 / iPhone 16 Pro / iPhone 16 Pro Max / iPhone 16e
- iPhone 15 / iPhone 15 Plus / iPhone 15 Pro / iPhone 15 Pro Max
- iPhone 14 / iPhone 14 Plus / iPhone 14 Pro / iPhone 14 Pro Max
- iPhone 13 / iPhone 13 mini / iPhone 13 Pro / iPhone 13 Pro Max
- iPhone 12 / iPhone 12 mini / iPhone 12 Pro / iPhone 12 Pro Max
- iPhone SE (2nd generation or later)
As mentioned above, the same eight new emojis are also included as part of iPadOS 26.4, tvOS 26.4, watchOS 26.4, and macOS 26.4.