The new emoji that will arrive on your iPhone later this year have finally been revealed.
Among them are a lime, a phoenix, a brown mushroom, a broken metal chain, two shaking heads, and four gender neural families.
There are also more than 100 people watching sideways in a variety of skin colors and genders, including some with canes and others in wheelchairs.
The new emoji will be available on Apple devices with the latest iOS update, iOS 17.4, due out in spring.
It will be a follow-up to iOS 17.3, which was released earlier this month with security fixes for more than a dozen bugs.
A file, a bobbing head, and four gender neural families are among the new emoji available on Apple devices with the latest iOS update. There’s also a phoenix, a brown mushroom, and a breaking metal chain and emoticons that bob their heads up and down.
Emojipedia, which is part of the Unicode Consortium, the central bank of all approved emoji, approved the new version of emoji, called 15.1.
“The new emojis in today’s beta are drawn from the September 2023 Unicode Recommendations: Emoji 15.1,” said Keith Broni, editor-in-chief of Emojipedia.
“Based on previous iOS beta history, the final public release of iOS 17.4 is likely to reach users in March or April 2024.”
The draft list of new emoji was approved in September, but now Emojipedia has published the first look at Apple’s designs coming to iOS.
Companies are applying stylized versions of the new emoji designs to their own operating systems, including Samsung and Google, as well as Apple.
As Apple’s emoji designs show, the four gender neural families take the form of silhouettes, similar to the existing ‘Bust in Silhouette’ and ‘Busts in Silhouette’.
Apple’s gender neural family emojis are white on a light blue background, while rival Samsung has black figures on a gray background.
They are made up of two parents and a son, a father and two sons, a father and a son, and two fathers and two sons.
Since 2019, Apple has offered iPhone users non-binary versions of almost every human emoji, from mermaids to chefs.
Revealed: The four new family emojis without gender specification, specific to Apple’s operating system (iOS)
Samsung’s designs (pictured) are slightly different than Apple’s. For example, Samsung’s chain is thicker, while its file looks more cartoonish.
Other differences are noticeable when looking at Samsung’s versions of the new emoji.
For example, Samsung’s chain is thicker, while its file looks less realistic and more cartoonish than Apple’s.
Meanwhile, Apple’s phoenix is facing sideways instead of forward and has more details on its wings.
The vast majority of the 118 new emoji are made up of new versions that specify the address of six existing people emojis, in a variety of genders and skin tones.
The six existing people emojis are person walking sideways, person kneeling, person with a cane, person in a motorized wheelchair, person in a manual wheelchair, and person running.
Notably, the new list does not include flag emojis, not just geographic flags, but also pride flags, language flags, and other color-based flags.
Pictured are Apple’s new versions of six existing people emojis that specify the address. These add up to 108 new emojis when taking into account the numerous gender and skin tone variations.
The decision to no longer create flag emojis was revealed earlier this year, due to the “transitory nature” of many pride flags and the “challenges that include some identities and exclude others,” Emojipedia said.
Looking ahead, the next batch of emoji will likely be revealed in the summer and approved in September before launching in 2025.
To be considered, the candidate emoji must have multiple uses, be used in sequences, break new ground, be distinctive, be compatible, and be used frequently, according to the Unicode Consortium.
In the past, Emojipedia has revealed new emoji around World Emoji Day, July 17, so the next batch will likely be announced around then.
‘Pregnant man’ included in emoji list 14.0
Two emoji, “pregnant man” and a gender-neutral “pregnant person,” were among those included in the 14.0 list of approved emoji coming to devices in 2021 and 2022.
The pregnant man and the pregnant person recognize that ‘pregnancy is possible for some transgender men and non-binary people,’ said Emojipedia, a voting member of the Unicode Consortium.
Men get pregnant in both real life and fiction, Emojipedia argued, like Arnold Schwarzenegger in the 1994 film ‘Junior.’
The “pregnant man” and “pregnant person” emoji could also be used as “an ironic way to show a baby with food, a very full stomach caused by eating a large meal.”
Guidelines for using the term “pregnant person” instead of “pregnant woman” (such as those issued by the British Medical Association in 2017, in an attempt to recognize trans and non-binary people) were described at the time as “a “insult to women.”
Jane Solomon, Emojipedia’s ‘senior emoji lexicographer’, described the new emoji in a blog post titled ‘Why is there a pregnant man emoji?’
“The new pregnancy options can be used for representation of trans men, non-binary people or women with short hair, although of course the use of these emoji is not limited to these groups,” he said.
‘Men can be pregnant. This applies to the real world (e.g. trans men) and fictional universes (e.g. Arnold Schwarzenegger in (1994 film) “Junior.”
‘People of any gender can also get pregnant. Now there are emoji to represent this.”
For now, Unicode maintains the more conventional “pregnant woman” emoji, which has been an emoji since 2016.