Draft Emoji List for 2027/2028 Unveiled

The initial draft list of new emojis proposed for next year has been released by Unicode, with five new emojis so far recommended for inclusion in the expected September 2027 release of Emoji 19.0.

As per the latest report from Unicode's Emoji Standard & Research Working Group (ESR), a total of five new emojis are recommended for next year: four new emoji codepoints and one new emoji sequence. These recommendations are as follows:

• Vulture: a large bird of prey associated with scavenging.
• Ornate Bottle: a decorative bottle that could represent potions, elixirs, oils, or syrups.
• Orchid: a new flower emoji depicting the tropical flowering plant.
• Inukshuk: a stone structure associated with Inuit culture, navigation, and the Arctic.
• Eyes Looking Right: a new directional variation of the existing 👀 Eyes emoji, which is expected to use the ➡️ Right Arrow as part of the sequence, as per Emoji 15.1's direction-specifying people sequences.

The report notes that if Eyes Looking Right is approved, the 👀 Eyes should be renamed as 👀 Eyes Looking Left.

The report also provides preliminary sample designs for each of the five proposed emojis, as shown above.

These sample images are in a Google Noto Color Emoji style, as has been the case for several years now given that Google's head of emoji design, Jennifer Daniel, also chairs Unicode's Emoji Standard & Research Working Group.

Their eventual appearances on Apple, Samsung, and other platforms will depend on how individual vendors choose to represent them.

While these sample designs are in the classic Noto Color Emoji style, they are themselves subject to change before Google's official implementation of Emoji 19.0. For example, changes were made between Unicode's sample designs for Emoji 18.0 and their eventual release across Google's various emoji design sets.

⏳ Are these all the new emojis?

All five proposed emojis are currently draft candidates for Emoji 19.0.

Both Unicode 19.0 and Emoji 19.0 are in draft form and are therefore subject to change between now and their expected approval in September 2027. Additionally, while this report was made available to the public, at the time of writing, the minutes of the UTC #189 meeting at which the report was discussed are still awaiting publication.

Between now and September 2027, Unicode will conduct several additional reviews of these draft emoji candidates, meaning that some proposals may not advance to final approval.

There is also a possibility that additional emojis could be added to the draft list before it is finalized, though later additions that expand the number of proposed emojis have been exceptionally rare in recent years.

However, the existing list could also change without increasing the total number of proposed emojis. This happened with Emoji 18.0, when the initially proposed Face With Squinting Eyes emoji was replaced by the 🫫 Cracking Face emoji ahead of its September 2026 release.

🗓️ So, at least some will arrive in September?

Yes and no: it depends on your device.

Once Unicode approves a new set of 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 notable 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 the platform in question.

For example, while the Emoji 18.0 emojis were approved last month, they are only available on a limited number of devices that support the latest version of Google's Noto 3D emoji release.

They are also presently available within the font files for Google's Noto Color Emoji and Noto Emoji design sets, as well as select other emoji font projects, though these updates are not available through scheduled OS updates on devices.

🧮 How many emojis in total?

If all five of these provisional emoji candidates are approved in September 2027, with no further additions being made to the list, Emoji 19.0 will bring the total number of Unicode-recommended emojis to 3,977.

Notably, if the list remains unchanged, Emoji 19.0 would be the smallest Unicode emoji release to date, falling below 2024's Emoji 16.0, which introduced just eight new emojis.

This relatively small number of proposed additions reflects Unicode's current selective approach to expanding the emoji set, with new candidates carefully evaluated against criteria including their expected frequency of use, versatility, and wider communicative value. This contrasts with the considerably larger numbers of new emoji concepts recommended during the late 2010s.

The larger totals seen in some recent emoji updates were largely due to the introduction of new sequences and variations of existing emojis, rather than entirely new emoji concepts.

For example, Emoji 17.0 introduced 163 new emojis in 2025, though only seven were entirely new emoji concepts, with the remaining 156 comprising new sequences and variations of existing emojis.

The same report that outlines these new draft emoji proposals also detailed a change to its annual emoji proposal submission timetable.

The next submission window, for Emoji 20.0, is scheduled to open on February 2, 2027, and close on May 31, 2027, moving the review process earlier in the year after several years of April-to-July submission periods.

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, there are 156,933 characters that 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.