New Emojis In 2024-2025

A smiley face with bags under its eyes, a paint splatter, and a human fingerprint are among the new emoji concepts up for approval. Today, ahead of World Emoji Day 2024 (July 17), we here at Emojipedia have released our traditional sample designs for all the new emoji candidates.

Keith Broni

• 6 min read
New Emojis In 2024-2025

A smiley face with bags under its eyes, a paint splatter, and a human fingerprint are among the new emoji concepts up for approval. Today, ahead of World Emoji Day 2024 (July 17), we here at Emojipedia have released our traditional sample designs for all the new emoji candidates.

Above: Emojipedia Sample Images for Draft Emoji 16.0. Image: Emojipedia

The draft Emoji 16.0 list also includes a root vegetable, a leafless tree, a harp, a shovel, and the flag of Sark, one of the Channel Islands.

Which of the new Emoji 16.0 emojis are you most looking forward to? You can vote for your favorite in the Most Anticipated Emoji category as part of the 2024 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 on World Emoji Day!

🧮 How many in total?

These eight new emoji concepts are the entire list of draft candidates for Emoji 16.0, which is expected to be approved on Tuesday 10 September 2024 alongside Unicode 16.0. Assuming all are approved, Emoji 16.0 will bring the total number of emojis recommended for general interchange (RGI) by Unicode to 3,790.

Made with Flourish

This makes Emoji 16.0 the shortest list of emoji draft candidates in history, with the next lowest number of recommendations being 31 for Emoji 15.0 in September 2022.

Made with Flourish

This reduction in new annual additionals to the emoji keyboard is intentional on the part of the Unicode Emoji Subcommittee. Speaking to the publication Quartz in 2022, the Subcommittee Chairperson Jennifer Daniel stated:

My hope is that it’s becoming more apparent to the public that we’re encoding fewer emoji year after year—less things that are theoretical

🏴 The flag for Sark?

Even those who follow emoji news closely may be slightly confused by the inclusion of the 🇨🇶 Flag for Sark in the Emoji 16.0 draft list.

This is because back in March 2022 Unicode announced that it would no longer be accepting proposals for "flag emoji of any category."

This policy remains in force, though at the time of this policy's announcement, Unicode did highlight how further national/regional flags could come into existence in that same blog post:

The Unicode Consortium isn’t in the business of determining what is a country and what isn’t. That’s when the Consortium chose ISO 3166-1 alpha 2 as the source for valid country designations. ISO 3166 is a widely-accepted standard, and this particular mechanism represents each country with 2 letters, such as “US” (For United States), “FR” (France), or “CN” (China).

Sark received an “exceptionally reserved” ISO 3166 code of CQ within ISO 3166-1, paving the way for it to receive its own emoji flag recommended for general interchange (RGI) without the need for a formal proposal.

In fact, this is the first time a new national/regional flag emoji has been added through this automatic recommendation mechanism since emoji flags were first formally approved in Emoji 1.0 back in 2015 (select flags had existed on Apple devices since 2008, but were not recommended by Unicode until 2015).

(What about the 🏴󠁧󠁢󠁥󠁮󠁧󠁿 England, 🏴󠁧󠁢󠁳󠁣󠁴󠁿 Scotland, and 🏴󠁧󠁢󠁷󠁬󠁳󠁿 Wales, you may ask? These nations don't have an ISO 3166 code, and yet they are included within the emoji keyboard through emoji tag sequences that were implemented based on an approved 2016 proposal)

🎨 Are these the final emoji designs?

No - the emoji designs shown above are not the final designs you should expect to see arrive on your digital devices from September 10 onwards.

To be clear, the Emojipedia Sample Images shown within the images are just one way in which these emojis might look. For now the ninth year in a row, these designs have been created by Emojipedia's Head of Emoji Design Joshua Jones.

Our Emojipedia Sample Images have intentionally been created in a glossy style directly inspired by the Apple emoji set.

Actual vendor designs will vary from those released by major vendors, though we have already been given some insight into how these emojis may appear on Android devices:

The designs above, which Unicode themselves provide as sample designs, are rendered in the Google Noto Color Emoji style.

This is not surprising, given the fact that the current Unicode Emoji Subcommittee chairperson, Jennifer Daniel, is also the head of emoji design at Google.

📋 What are "Draft Emojis"?

It must be noted once again that this is still only a draft list of new emoji recommendations.

They are not yet formally approved by Unicode and are therefore subject to change between now and their scheduled approval date of 10 September 2024.

However, while it is subject to change before its expected approval on September 10th, since 2017 all of the draft emoji candidates that have been publically listed have ended up being approved for use within the emoji keyboard.

For additional information about the Emoji 16.0 draft list, you can review the Unicode 16.0 draft release notes and Emoji 16.0 beta page. The latter includes recommended keywords and proposal documents.

🗓️ Emoji Release Timeline

So, when can you get these eight new emojis on your iPhone, Pixel, or other devices and platforms?

Based on the last few years, here's our estimated timeline for Emoji 16.0's approval and release across major emoji vendors:

  • October 2024: Samsung will debut its support in a One UI update
  • October / November 2024: Google will preview their designs via their Github, with their designs released progressively across their different platforms during Q4 2024 / Q1 2025.
  • January / February 2025: WhatsApp will release their Emoji 16.0 for Android devices
  • March / April 2025: Apple will release their Emoji 16.0 support via iOS 18.4
  • Summer 2025: Facebook (including Messenger)
  • Summer / Fall 2025: Microsoft via a major Windows 11.

For reference, here's when each vendor began to support (or began to preview) 2023's Emoji 15.1 recommendations:

At the time of writing, Facebook has yet to debut support for Emoji 15.1. Additionally, the offshoot of Twemoji that is now being maintained in part by members of the Discord designs team has yet to have its Emoji 15.1 designs implemented despite the designs being previewed on GitHub.

Additionally, here's when those same vendors began to support 2022's Emoji 15.0 recommendations: