Nine new emojis, approved in September

Not yet on your phone, but soon: Unicode approved 9 new emojis on September 16, 2026, and most phones should get them in the first half of 2027. They include a pickle, a lighthouse and two thumbs that point sideways. Count the skin tones on the thumbs and Emoji 18.0 adds 19 in total.

Last year's set is already here. Emoji 17.0 reached iPhones in March 2026 with an orca, a trombone, a treasure chest and five more, and you can copy all 8 further down.

The Unicode Consortium decides which emojis exist. Apple, Google, Samsung and Microsoft then draw their own version of each one, which is why a pickle on one phone can look like a cucumber on another.

The 9 new emojis in Emoji 18.0, and who asked for them

Every emoji starts as a proposal to Unicode, written by whoever wants it. Here is each one, with the reason its proposal gives. Our sister site eeemoji walks through the whole road in how an emoji becomes an emoji.

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  Cracking face

  U+1FAEB · Proposed by Jennifer Daniel, who chairs Unicode’s emoji working group, for a facade that breaks: “I’m fine” when you are not, or cracking up.

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  Leftwards thumb sign

  U+1FAF9 · Proposed by Daniel Nathaniel Olobayo as a quieter way to point than the index finger, which is rude in many countries, and for “get a load of this guy”.

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  Rightwards thumb sign

  U+1FAFA · The same proposal, pointing the other way. It also names the hitchhiker’s thumb.

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  Monarch butterfly

  U+1FACC · Proposed by Amy Whitaker for migration and change, and for the souls the monarchs are said to carry home on Día de los Muertos.

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  Pickle

  U+1FADD · Proposed by Elizabeth Scopel for the food and for being in a pickle: “Cucumbers are a wet, diet food… Pickles are a treat.”

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  Lighthouse

  U+1F6D9 · Proposed by Thomas Cappelli and Pierre Avinain: no building emoji stood for guidance at sea, and a lighthouse is “a beacon in the dark”.

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  Meteor

  U+1FA8B · Proposed by Unicode’s emoji working group to end the comet mix-up: platforms that draw a fiery comet move that design here.

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  Eraser

  U+1FA8C · Proposed by Karin Nakagawa of Kansai University Elementary School, to finish the stationery set, and for its other meanings: to forget, to cancel, to take back.

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  Net with handle

  U+1FA8D · Proposed by Emojination, first in 2020: a butterfly net, for bug hunts, insect science, and “catch feelings”.

The reasons are from each emoji's proposal on unicode.org (L2/26-048 for the cracking face, L2/25-252 to L2/25-258 for the rest), linked under References. Unicode says it may approve an emoji for reasons other than the ones its proposal gives. Images: Google's Noto Color Emoji, released September 24, 2026 under the Apache License 2.0. Your phone will draw its own.

Three of them fix old mix-ups

Three of the nine are not new ideas. They split an old emoji in two, because phone makers had been drawing one character as two different things:

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• Pickle and cucumber: Apple, WhatsApp and Huawei draw a sliced cucumber, while Samsung and Microsoft draw something closer to a pickle, as Google did until recently. Now each gets its own emoji, and eeemoji has the pickle's own page.
• Meteor and comet: the comet started out as a blue ball of ice and drifted into a fiery red rock on many phones. The fiery one is now the meteor, and the comet can go back to blue.
• Monarch butterfly and butterfly: the plain butterfly is a monarch on some phones and a blue morpho on others. The monarch gets its own code point.

Nothing you already sent changes. A cucumber you sent last year is still a cucumber. The split only means the designs should agree once every phone has updated.

Until the new ones reach your phone, the old ones are the closest you can send, and the pointing fingers stand in for the sideways thumbs. Tap one to copy it, or find any other emoji in our Copy Emoji tool:

• 🥒Cucumber
• 👈Pointing left
• 👉Pointing right
• ☄️Comet
• 🦋Butterfly

The sideways thumbs point instead of judging

👍 means yes, 👎 means no, and until now there was no thumb for "this one". The leftwards and rightwards thumb signs point at something instead of judging it. Unicode's own keywords for them are "this", "that" and "point", which is exactly how people already use 👈 and 👉 in a group chat.

They are also why 9 emojis turn into 19. Each thumb comes in the default yellow plus five skin tones, like most hand gestures: 2 thumbs in 6 versions is 12, and 12 plus the other 7 makes 19.

When your phone gets them

Not yet. Approval is the start of the line, and each company ships the new emojis in its own update. Emojipedia, which tracks every release, expects this order, based on how last year's emojis rolled out.

Until the phone on the other end has the update, a new emoji arrives as an empty box or a question mark. Font people call that box "tofu", and it is where Google's Noto fonts get their name: no more tofu.

How do I get them?

Update your phone when the update arrives. On an iPhone the emojis come with iOS itself, so no app or keyboard can add them sooner. On Android, WhatsApp draws its own emojis, so WhatsApp users there can get them first: last year that was 18 days before the iPhone.

Until then, the old emojis in the mix-ups above come closest, and you can copy them from there.

The 8 that arrived in 2026

Emoji 17.0, approved in September 2025, is the set on phones now. WhatsApp on Android began rolling it out on March 6, 2026, and iOS 26.4 brought it on March 24. That update brought 163 new emojis, but 150 of them are skin tone combinations for two emojis that already existed, people wrestling and people with bunny ears. These are the 8 new ones:

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  Distorted face

  Bulging eyes, as if seen through a fish-eye lens

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  Fight cloud

  The dust cloud of a cartoon brawl

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  Hairy creature

  Bigfoot and its cousins

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  Ballet dancer

  In the default color and five skin tones

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  Orca

  The killer whale

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  Landslide

  Rocks sliding down a slope

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  Trombone

  For jazz, or a sad slide down

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  Treasure chest

  Gold, gems and loot

The copy button copies the real character. On a phone or computer without Emoji 17.0 it pastes as a box until you update. Every emoji up to Emoji 17.0, these 8 included, is in our Copy Emoji tool, where you can search by name and copy one with a click.

A small year for emoji

19 is a small update. Counting skin tones, it is the second smallest since Emoji 11.0 in 2018, after 2024's 8.

The rest of Unicode 18.0

Emoji are a small part of each Unicode release. Unicode 18.0 adds 13,007 characters, and 11,328 of them are Small Seal script, the ideographs of China's Qin dynasty. Three are new currency signs: the Maldivian rufiyaa, the UAE dirham and the Omani rial.

To a computer each of these is the same kind of thing as an emoji: a numbered character that a font has to draw. So are the bold and script letters people paste into a bio, which our Unicode Text Generator makes from plain text.