First Look: New Emojis in iOS 15.4

New emojis have arrived on iOS as part of the first iOS 15.4 beta. These include a melting face, pregnant man, mirror disco ball, and multi-racial handshake emojis.

Keith Broni

Jan 27, 2022 • 4 min read

New emojis have arrived on iOS as part of the first iOS 15.4 beta. These include a melting face, pregnant man, mirror disco ball, and multi-racial handshake emojis.

Editor's Note: iOS 15.4 is out now. Read more about the official release.

The new emojis included in this beta release are drawn from Unicode's September 2021 recommendations: Emoji 14.0.

😀 New Smileys

The iOS 15.4 beta includes seven brand new smiley emojis - the largest number since 2017's iOS 11.1 update.

While 🫢 Face with Open Eyes and Hand Over Mouth may look familiar to many, this is a new emoji, intended to be displayed with open/neutral eyes on all platforms.

🤭 Face with Hand Over Mouth has a new appearance in iOS 15.4 beta 1, now showing with smiling eyes to match other major vendors.

🤭 Face with Hand Over Mouth has changed its design in this beta update to match that of other emoji vendors.

Meanwhile, the new 🫢 Face with Open Eyes and Hand Over Mouth emoji is rendered in today's iOS 15.4 beta with the same design 🤭 Face with Hand Over Mouth has been presented with since 2017's iOS 11.1.

This disambiguation should help avoid emoji confusion when 🤭 is sent in future, such as that experienced by Jameela Jamil on Twitter in April 2020:

🧑 Gender Consistency

Since 2019 vendors have been making considerable efforts to offer all people emojis with three different gender variants: one 👨 Man, one 👩 Woman, and a non-gender-specifying 🧑 Person.

This latest Apple beta update continues this trend by adding two new gender neutral people emojis in the form of 🫅 Person with Crown and 🫄 Pregnant Person, as well as adding a new 🫃 Pregnant Man emoji.

✋ New Hand Gestures

This beta update also includes seven brand new hand gestures emojis, each of which support skin tone modifiers.

🤝 Multi-Racial Handshakes

Today's beta release also includes 25 new versions of the 🤝 Handshake emoji.

While other vendors have supported single skin-tone variations of the 🤝 Handshake, this is the first time Apple devices have supported this type of emoji design within their native emoji set.

However, while each of these new 🤝 Handshake emoji designs are supported within today's iOS 15.4 beta, at present the emoji picker only offers the five variants where both hands share the same skin tone.

This is expected to changed ahead of the official release of iOS 15.4 in the coming months, likely via an additional iOS 15.4 beta update.

🆕 More New Emojis

Rounding out the new emojis are a handful of new additions in the 🐻 Animals & Nature, 🍔 Food & Drink, 💡 Objects, and 🔣 Symbols emoji categories.

📶 Release

Coming to iOS later "this Spring" (northern hemisphere), these updates are in iOS 15.4 beta 1 which is now available for developers.

Based on past iOS beta history it's likely that the final public release of iOS 15.4 will come to users in March or April 2022.

As with all beta software, designs are subject to change prior to the final release. This has been happening with less frequency in recent years, ever since bagelgate.