New Emojis Released Including Italian Hands And Everything’s Fine Face

Emojipedia/Unicode Consortium

It’s that time of year again, when everyone gets really excited about a bunch of new emojis that realistically we’ll only use around 5% of.

That’s right folks, a whole host of new emojis have been unveiled, including the ‘Italian hand gesture’, a disguised face, ninjas (because why wouldn’t we need a ninja emoji?!), a smiling face with a single tear, and a green pepper. Random but okay.

Some of the new emojis have slightly more rhyme and reason behind them and reflect the continued push towards diversity by Emojipedia, with the transgender flag and symbol, a gender-neutral Santa Claus (Mx. Claus), and a man or gender-neutral person in a veil all included in the update.

You can see all of the new emojis below:

In total, 117 new emojis have been approved for release in the second half of 2020, and will be available to download later this year on the iPhone, iPad, Mac, Android and more.

Unicode Consortium shared the official list of the latest emojis yesterday, with additional emojis including bubble tea, a black cat, a boomerang, people hugging, and some fondue.

Not stopping there, Unicode also added a woman or gender-neutral person in a tuxedo, men and women feeding babies, as well as a gender-neutral person feeding a baby to the 2020 list.

It comes as the organisation attempts to make its selection of emojis more inclusive, after it was criticised for not including the transgender flag – which is pink, blue and white – in previous releases.

The website Emojipedia, which is part of the Unicode Consortium and details the emoji updates, said:

This addition is part of an ongoing effort to make more consistent set of gender options across the board, and expands upon the 138 new gender-neutral emojis added in late 2019 as part of Emoji 12.1.

Further additions include extinct and near-extinct animals such as polar bears (which are considered vulnerable), bisons (near-threatened), mammoths and dodos (both of which are extinct).

My favourite has to be the seal though:

I mean, just look at it! Don’t get your hopes up too soon though, because although all of these designs might have been approved for use, they won’t be arriving on our phones just yet.

While Unicode created the designs, these are just the templates, meaning it’s now up to Apple and Google to develop their own versions before we actually start seeing them on our devices.

I’m sure they’ll be worth the wait though.

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Lucy Connolly

A Broadcast Journalism Masters graduate who went on to achieve an NCTJ level 3 Diploma in Journalism, Lucy has done stints at ITV, BBC Inside Out and Key 103. While working as a journalist for UNILAD, Lucy has reported on breaking news stories while also writing features about mental health, cervical screening awareness, and Little Mix (who she is unapologetically obsessed with).