Twemoji 12.1.5 Emoji Changelog

Keith Broni

Jan 27, 2020 • 6 min read

Today Twitter has released Twemoji 12.1.5, bringing a large selection of new gender neutral emojis to the platform.

This release comes not long after Twemoji 12.1.4, which updated several existing emojis to show a gender neutral appearance.

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Above: All the brand new emojis in Twemoji 12.1.5. Image: Twitter designs / Emojipedia composite.

A total of 168 new emojis are included in Twemoji 12.1.5, all of which are part of Emoji 12.1 which was approved by Unicode in October 2019.

All new emojis in Emoji 12.1 are constructed using zero-width-joiner (ZWJ) sequences, which all use existing emoji codepoints to create the new gender inclusive options^[1].

Both 💏 Kiss and 👪 Family were also amongst the 394 previously-available emoji designs revised in Twemoji 12.1.4 in November 2019.

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Above: All the updated emoji designs featured in Twemoji 12.1.4. Image: Twitter designs / Emojipedia composite.

Now in Twemoji, the need to choose a specific gender when sending an emoji such as a 👮 Police Officer or 🏄 Person Surfing is no longer a requirement, while for gendered variations such as 👮‍♀️ Woman Police Officer and 🏄‍♂️ Man Surfing) remain options.

This approach is more consistent with how the Unicode Consortium defines many emojis and follows similar updates made by Apple and Google in recent months.

🆕 New

Twemoji 12.1.5 has today introduced gender neutral versions of Emoji 11.0's hair options which were previously limited to 👩 Woman or 👨 Man.

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Above: New gender-neutral emojis with various hair styles in Twemoji 12.1.5.

Additionally, there are non-gender-specific 🧑 Person designs using a 🦯 Probing Cane, 🦽 Manual Wheelchair, and 🦼 Motorized Wheelchair.

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Above: New accessibility-focused gender neutral emojis.

There are a total of 16 new profession-based emoji designs introduced in Twemoji 12.1.5, providing previously-unavailable gender neutral versions of the likes of 🧑‍🎤 Singer and 🧑‍✈️ Pilot.

Above: New profession-based emojis without a gender specified.

Finally, Twemoji 12.1.5 expands the skin tone compositions options for three of the four types of hand holding emojis, specifically 🧑‍🤝‍🧑 People Holding Hands, 👭 Women Holding Hands, and 👬 Men Holding Hands.

As per Emoji 12.1 now the order of skin tones can also be chosen. For example 👩🏿‍🤝‍👩🏻 Women Holding Hands: Dark Skin Tone, Light Skin Tone was available months ago, yet the opposite sequence of 👩🏻‍🤝‍👩🏿 Women Holding Hands: Light Skin Tone, Dark Skin Tone is new in this release. Both feature a woman with dark skin tone and one with light skin tone, but the new sequence is in the opposite order.

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Above: 🧑‍🤝‍🧑 People Holding Hands combinations in Twemoji 12.1.5.

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Above: a selection of Twemoji 12.1.5's new 👭 Women Holding Hands combinations.

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Above: a selection of Twemoji 12.1.5's new 👬 Men Holding Hands combinations.

🆙 Changes

Below is a selection of the 394 emojis changed in the previous release; Twemoji 12.1.4.

The majority of these changes were been made in the name of a more gender neutral presentation.

💇 Person Getting Haircut now appears with shorter hair, paler lips and an orange top in the gender-neutral version.

👯 People With Bunny Ears now wear leotards with longer shorts and higher necklines in the gender-neutral version.

🧜 Merperson now has purple hair and is no longer wearing a strapless top in the gender-neutral version.

🧟 Zombie has new hair, is clad in orange, and has lost their tie and collar in the gender-neutral version.

🧑‍🤝‍🧑 People Holding Hands now displays two gender neutral people holding hands, as opposed to a woman and a man.

💏 Kiss has been changed to two gender neutral people kissing, instead of a woman and man.

👪 Family now shows two ambiguous adults and one ambiguous child, with the adults' clothing taking the colors from 🧑‍🤝‍🧑 People Holding Hands.

⏸️ Unchanged

💑 Couple With Heart continues to show a woman and man, instead of switching to a gender inclusive design.

Emojipedia-Twemoji-12.3-Couple-With-Heart

This contrasts with both Apple and Google's recent updates of this particular emoji.

📶 Release

Rollout of Twemoji 12.1.5 began today across Twitter's various platforms. Twemoji 12.1.5 support will be made available for all users of the Twitter website, the Twitter mobile site, Tweetdeck, and progressively roll out to Twitter for Android. Twemoji 12.1.4 was released in November 2019.

Twemoji 12.1.5 will also be made available via the Open Source Twemoji Repository in the coming days, where Twemoji 12.1.4 is already available.

Users of the iOS Twitter app will continue to see Apple emoji designs, as Twitter for iOS uses to the native system designs for emoji support.

NOTE: An earlier version of this article mentioned 10 new emojis for skin tone variations of the single codepoint 💏 Kiss and 👪 Family. These were not part of this release, and the reference has been removed.

For example, the 23 new non-gender-specific emojis (138 when you include skin tone variations) use the 🧑 Person emoji in the place of the 👩 Woman or 👨 Man used in the previously-available gender-specific versions of these emojis. ↩︎