Draft Emoji List for 2026/2027

As the new calendar year continues to unfold, let's review the latest list of proposed new emojis that could find their way to our standard emoji keyboards later in 2026. Possible new emojis include a squinting face, two new thumb sign gestures, a pickle, and a lighthouse.

Quietly uploaded to Unicode's public document archives late last year, this update from the Unicode Emoji Standard & Research Working Group proposed a total of 9 new emoji concepts for release as part of September 2026's Emoji 18.0, as well as 10 additional two skin modifier variants related to two of these new concepts.

These new additions, shown above, are as follows:

• A smiley face with squinting eyes
• A leftward thumb sign gesture
• A rightward thumb sign gesture
• A monarch butterfly (as opposed to the non-specifying 🦋)
• A pickle (as opposed to a 🥒 Cucumber)
• A lighthouse
• A meteor (as opposed to a ☄️ Comet)
• An eraser, for removing pencil markings from paper
• A net with a handle, like those used to catch bugs

The designs shown above have been provided in a Google Noto Color Emoji style, either by the Noto Color Emoji team members or, in select instances, from the proposal of the new emoji concept.

⏳ Are these all the new emojis? When do I get them?

All 19 proposed emojis are currently draft candidates for Emoji 18.0. Both Unicode 18.0 and Emoji 18.0 remain in draft form and are therefore subject to change.

Between now and September 2026, Unicode will conduct several additional reviews of these draft emoji candidates, meaning that some proposals may not advance to final approval.

For example, the Apple Core emoji proposed in late 2024 was ultimately not included within Emoji 17.0 despite its initial inclusion within the draft list. It was removed from that list in early 2025 and deferred to the Emoji 18.0 draft at the time.

However, since them the proposal was recommended for removal from the Emoji 18.0 draft as well, effectively halting its progress toward inclusion on emoji keyboards for the time being.

Although this marked the first removal of a draft emoji proposal since 2017, it underscores that such outcomes are still possible.

There is also a chance, albeit a small one, that additional emojis could be added to the draft candidate list between now and approval of the final Emoji 18.0 list expected in September 2026.

🗓️ So, at least some will arrive in September?

Not so fast.

After Unicode recommends a new set of draft emojis, it’s up to individual emoji vendors, such as Apple, Google, and Samsung, to design and implement their own versions of each newly approved concept.

As a result, there is often a long delay between Unicode approval and when those emojis actually appear on iPhone or Android keyboards. Sometimes it can take many months or up to a year, depending on then platform in question.

Last year’s Emoji 17.0 recommendations illustrate this clearly: although they were approved in September 2025, they have yet to be rolled out on any standard emoji keyboards for the general public.

They are presently available within the font files for Google's Noto Color Emoji and Noto Emoji design sets, though only in beta for actual Android devices.

Additionally, they have been added to the Twemoji offshoot managed by Discord, though they have yet to be implemented within the messaging platform's emoji panel.

🧮 How many emojis in total?

If all 19 of these provisional emoji candidates are approved in September 2026 with no further additions being made to the list, Emoji 18.0 will bring the total number of Unicode-recommended emojis to 3,972.

📋 Support Unicode

The Unicode Consortium is a small non-profit organization that is funded primarily through membership fees and donations.

One means through which Unicode obtains additional funding is their Adopt A Character program, through which either a person or an organization can be listed as a sponsor of an emoji or, indeed, any other character within Unicode.

In fact, more than 151,700 characters can be adopted.

Adopting a character helps the non-profit Unicode Consortium in its goal to support the world’s languages and, of course, continue to encode new emojis within the Unicode Standard.