New Emojis In 2022-2023

A Shaking Face, two pushing hands, and a plain Pink Heart. These are just some of the emojis that are up for approval this September. Ahead of World Emoji Day, Emojipedia has created sample designs for each candidate emoji.

Keith Broni

• 6 min read
New Emojis In 2022-2023

A Shaking Face, two pushing hands, and a plain Pink Heart. These are just some of the emojis that are up for approval this September. Ahead of World Emoji Day, Emojipedia has created sample designs for each candidate emoji. While some might not make the cut, most presented for approval are historically confirmed.

Above: Emojipedia Sample Images for Draft Emoji 15.0. Image: Emojipedia

Other inclusions on the Emoji 15.0 draft list alongside Shaking Face and Pink Heart are Light Blue Heart, Grey Heart, Donkey, Jellyfish, Hair Pick, and a Khanda - the symbol of the Sikh faith.

The Emojipedia Sample Images shown above are just one way in which these emojis might look, created by Emojipedia's Head of Emoji Design Joshua Jones.

This is our eighth year of providing sample emoji designs ahead of their official arrival on emoji keyboards.

Actual vendor designs will vary from those released by major vendors, and Emojipedia's own sample images may also be updated when Emoji 15.0 final is released.

Additionally, as this is only a draft emoji list, each emoji is subject to change prior to final approval in September 2022.

However, it is worth noting the majority of draft emoji candidates have ended up included on the final list over the last number of years - including every emoji we previewed from last year's Emoji 14.0 draft list ahead of World Emoji Day 2021.

So what that in mind, and with the sample designs above as a guide, which of the draft Emoji 15.0 emojis are you most looking forward to? You can vote for your favorite in the Most Anticipated Emoji category as part of the 2022 World Emoji Awards.

This isn't a part of the approval process, just a fun way to gauge which draft emojis people are most keen to use. So get voting, and the winner will be revealed ahead of World Emoji Day!

Speaking of World Emoji Day, in case you missed in over the last number of days:

For additional information about the Emoji 15.0 draft list, you can review the Unicode 15.0 draft release notes, and Emoji 15.0 beta page. The latter includes recommended keywords and proposal documents. We do have some of our own observations, however.

πŸ” New (Draft) Emoji Observations

While, again, the list is still in draft, there are a few observations we can make about the emojis that may well be arriving on our emoji keyboards later this year.

Firstly, Emoji 15.0 is likely to deliver upon a long-request emoji: a plain Pink Heart.

Above: Unicode proposal document for Emoji 15.0 including Pink Heart as well as Light Blue Heart and Grey Heart.

This has been one of the most discussed absences on the emoji keyboard for many years, with a Pink Heart being amongst our own assessments of the most popular emoji requests since 2016.

Isn't there already a pink heart, we hear some of you ask? Yes and no. In short, this will be a completely plain pink heart without additional adornments or features, that are defined by its color alone: think along the lines of 🧑 Orange Heart, πŸ’› Yellow Heart, πŸ’š Green Heart, and πŸ’™ Blue Heart.

The second observation is that this is a much smaller number of new emojis than has been the case in recent years.

The draft list for Emoji 15.0 contains only 31 recommended emojis, while 2021's Emoji 14.0 contained 112 recommendations, while 2020's Emoji 13.0 and Emoji 13.1 contained 334 between them (117 and 217, respectively).

Made with Flourish

In fact, it is the smallest number of new emojis that Unicode has ever recommended at any one time since before the "Emoji Version" numbering began.

Made with Flourish

Additionally, for the first time ever, there are no new people emojis in this batch of recommendations.

Made with Flourish

This does come, however, after people emojis have constituted a majority of the last three batches of emoji recommendations. And that's without counting the different body parts and gesture emojis.

2019's Emoji 12.1 was exclusively people emojis: a series of zero width joiner sequences that added gender-neutral variants of the different profession/role emojis from 2016's Emoji 4.0 and the hairstyles from 2018's Emoji 11.0, as well as expanding upon the different πŸ§‘β€πŸ€β€πŸ§‘ People Holding Hands emojis first added in Emoji 12.0 earlier the same year.

Meanwhile, 2020's Emoji 13.1, which on its own added 212 different variations of existing people emojis - either gender-neutral variants or combinations that supported multiple skin tone options of the πŸ’ Kiss and πŸ’‘ Couple with Heart emojis.

Some final other miscellaneous thoughts:

πŸ—“ Emoji Timeline

When will you get the new emojis on your iPhone, Pixel, or other devices and platforms? There are two parts to this:

  1. It is yet to be confirmed which emojis are in the final version of Emoji 15.0 - as we've said above, this is still a draft list. However, based on recent years, the final version is likely to resemble this draft list. This means that no new emojis will be added at this stage, though there's a slight chance that a draft emoji candidate is changed or removed ahead of September.
  2. Release dates for emoji support always vary by the operating system, app, or device.

With those two things in mind, here's our estimated timeline for Emoji 15.0's approval and release across major emoji vendors.

Expect to see some companies come out with early emoji support in late 2022, and the majority of updates to take place in the first half of 2023.

Here's when each vendor began to support (or began to preview) last year's Emoji 14.0 recommendations.

πŸ“– Read More