The Most Anticipated Emoji of 2026 is...
Today is the thirteenth annual World Emoji Day, and ahead of the expected release of Emoji 18.0 in September of this year, we asked all of you to tell us which of the draft candidates you're most looking forward to using.
Today is the thirteenth annual World Emoji Day, and ahead of the expected release of Emoji 18.0 in September of this year, we asked all of you to tell us which of the draft candidates you're most looking forward to using.
As of January 2026, the Emoji 18.0 draft list contains 19 new emoji recommendations that break down as follows:
- A cracking face
- A leftward thumb sign gesture (with skin tone modifier support)
- A rightward thumb sign gesture (with skin tone modifier support)
- A monarch butterfly (as opposed to the non-specifying 🦋 Butterfly)
- 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
You can read more about these draft candidates via this blog post by Unicode Emoji Subcommittee chairperson and Google emoji chief Jennifer Daniel.
And The Winner Is...
Based on hundreds and hundreds of votes, your Most Anticiapted Emoji of 2026 is... The Cracking Face!
The Cracking Face emoji came first, with the Pickle in second, and Meteor in third. The Monarch Butterfly emoji came in 4th place, followed by the Lighthouse emoji in 5th.
To be clear, this isn't part of the approval process: it's just a fun way to gauge which draft emojis people are most keen to use.
As mentioned above, Unicode is expected to approve Emoji 18.0 in September 2026. This means that later this year is the earliest you can expect to get access to these new emojis, though most likely it will be early 2027 before they begin to arrive on your devices.
Take, for example, the current rollout of last September's Emoji 17.0 draft list thus far:
- September 2025: Google previewed its designs via its Noto Color Emoji and Noto Emoji font site pages
- November 2025: Discord added support within the GitHub repository for the Twemoji offshoot it contributes to
- March 6 2026: WhatsApp released its Emoji 17.0 support for Android devices
- March 24 2026: Apple released its Emoji 17.0 support via the iOS 26.4 update
- March 25 2026: Samsung debuted its support in the One UI 8.5 update
- March 2026: Google provided support for Android devices
- June 24 2026: JoyPixels released its 11.0 update, providing support
At the time of writing, Facebook and Microsoft have yet to implement support for Emoji 17.0.
A Late-Comer To The Draft List
Interestingly, the emoji that topped our poll wasn't even part of the original 2026/2027 draft list.
When we first covered the Emoji 18.0 candidates back on January 8, the ninth new face concept on the list was a Smiley Face With Squinting Eyes, not a Cracking Face.
That changed less than two weeks later. Ahead of the first Unicode Technical Committee meeting of 2026, the Unicode Emoji Standard & Research Working Group (ESR) recommended swapping the proposal out, renaming U+1FAEB from Face With Squinting Eyes to Cracking Face, on the grounds that the original concept needed further scrutiny before it could be encoded.
The update was subsequently reflected in the finalized draft list. It marked the second year running in which a draft emoji recommendation was altered during the public review period, following the Apple Core's removal from the Emoji 17.0 draft the year before.
In other words, the emoji you were most excited about had only been on the draft list for a few months by the time voting closed.