117 new Emojis are being added to the official emoji list, with the update set for release sometime later in 2020. They join the 3,000-plus already available. Notable additions include people hugging, “Italian hand gesture,” bubble tea, grave stones and a plunger.
There is also a greater focus on gender-inclusivity, as well as adding gender-neutral emojis. You can now have a woman in a suit or a man in a wedding dress, as well as the Transgender flag and the Transgender symbol. You still have the option for using yellow skin, or one of the five other skin tones for all emojis that feature a human face or appendage.
Non-human additions make up most of the 117 new emojis, however. Animals such as a polar bear, a seal, a beaver, a bison, and others join insects like beetles, cockroaches and flies. New food emojis include a green bell pepper, a fondue machine, tamales, blueberries and flatbread. Random items like a roller skate, a magic wand, a coin, a gravestone and a piñata also made the cut.
Do We Really Need More Emojis?
As mentioned earlier, there are already more than three-thousand emojis in the official database. Finding the emoji you need or want is already hard enough, requiring us to scroll through the sea of pages and categories. The 117 new additions are only going to clutter these pages more. Most people have their routine 10-20 Emojis that they use on a regular basis, with the thousands of others only being called into action when necessary.
On the other hand, the over-inflated catalog is good in that there is an emoji for basically any situation. If you’re at a Zoo and see a cute seal, you can’t currently express that through an emoji until this new batch which includes a seal is added later this year. There is also a search bar making it easier to shift through the dense set, making it easier to find exactly what you’re looking for. The continued support of gender-inclusive emojis is very important to some, and makes emojis even more diverse. These types of emojis have been requested for quite some time now.
There are positives and negatives to the new Emojis, with the trade off of having even more emojis but also a more cluttered selection screen. Emojis are still widely used, but don’t seem to be as popular as a few years prior when The Emoji Movie was released and Walmart was selling emoji merchandise like hotcakes. They might be out of the mainstream at the moment, but are still in wide use – especially within the younger generation. Perhaps one of the new 117 catches on and becomes the new “poomoji."
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