Earlier this year, my four-year-old nephew taught my brother a valuable lesson about parental controls by sneakily purchasing The Emoji Movie on Amazon Video, and promptly losing interest after five minutes. It was a critique which broadly matched the critical consensus.
Still, it seems our love of emoji is strong enough to withstand shameless cash-ins in the name of weak family-friendly entertainment. Today the Unicode Consortium releases Emoji 11.0, and with it come an additional 157 emoji, taking the grand total to 2,823 – which feels a little bit bloated, given so many people only seem to have ‘laughing with joy’ in their repertoire.
Regardless, leading the way is the red-headed emoji. Yes, for years everyone with hair coloured from bright red all the way to strawberry blonde has had to make do with a range of shades that don’t represent them. That’s no longer the case – and the same goes for those with curly hair, as their flowing locks are now part of the cartoony package too. Ditto white-haired and, indeed, no-haired.
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Other notable inclusions are a whole host of new animals (badgers and llamas and swans, oh my), a range of scientific logos (DNA, microbes and petri dishes), and some new foods (bagels, cupcakes and something called a mooncake.) You can see every one of them in the video below, accompanied by some jaunty muzak.
At this point, you may be wondering what isn’t covered in the emoji dictionary. Well, candidates for inclusion in the 2019 update are already out in the open and includes 60 new characters ranging from guide dogs and yo-yos to scuba kit and otters. And if what you’re looking for isn’t on that list, then submissions are being accepted for the 2020 update…
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