#Celebrate World Emoji Day with Tons of New Emoji from Apple and Android

Apple and Google are celebrating World Emoji Day with the unveiling of a wide variety of new emojis, and they’ll be arriving on your smartphone later this year. Whether you’re using an iPhone or an Android device, many of us find great enjoyment in inserting the appropriate emojis to help liven up our text messages and social media posts.iPhone users will be able to get the new emoji and Memoji designs in iOS 14, while Android users will need to wait for the launch of Android 11. Both are expected to release in September.

The full list of new emoji to be added was previously announced earlier this year, but today’s reveals for World Emoji Day are giving us our first look at so many of the new additions. Some of the notable new emojis include a ninja, beaver, dodo bird, boomerang, bubble tea, coin, tamale, pinata, and an anatomical heart and lungs. To feature more diverse representation, the transgender symbol will be added for the first time along with new characters including a man in a veil and a woman in a tuxedo. We can also probably expect the pinched fingers, also known as the “Italian Hand” gesture, to be used a lot when people post about the exquisite food they’d just cooked.

Several new Memoji options are also coming with the free emoji update. This includes a variety of new hairstyles, masks and face coverings, a bicycle helmet, a nurse’s cap, and an academic cap. Other Memoji options will include different colored face masks, which is rather appropriate for 2020. This is not surprising, as the face mask popularity has been used tremendously and was in the running to be named as the “Most 2020 Emoji” at the World Emoji Awards. With the event utilizing fan voting on social media to determine the winner, the face mask emoji was bested only by the microbe emoji. The winner has not yet been named.

Google will also be adding 62 new characters along with 55 skin tone and gender variants with the Android 11 update. The idea was to pitch for “more empathetic expressions and finding opportunities to bring equity to the keyboard.” They are also giving the animals a “more authentic look” based on consultation with the Monterey Bay Aquarium and Victoria Bug Zoo. Additionally, the company says they’ve redesigned some of the emoji characters to look better in dark-mode for late night texting.

Based on the chaos that is the year 2020, the Unicode Consortium will be holding off on approving any new emojis for the foreseeable future. These emojis that are set for 2020 will still be coming to smartphones this year, but they will apparently be the last new emojis smartphone users can expect to see added until 2022. It’s a bummer to have to wait that long for more, but this new set certainly comes with many interesting new ones for us to throw into our text messages in the meantime. You can see the new Apple emojis at Forbes, and you can look at the upcoming Android versions at 9to5Google.