Next round of new emoji will let you salute, melt, gasp and point

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Next round of new emoji will let you salute, melt, gasp and point
These fun new emoji will appear on your iPhone in 2022.
Graphic: Emojipedia

Soon there’ll be a fresh crop of new emoji that let you show you are melting, have a low battery or are feeling ambivalent or teary-eyed. There are 37 brand-new additions.

But don‘t get too enthusiastic. The emoji probably won’t appear on iPhones and other devices until 2022.

Fun new emoji for next year

The list of upcoming emoji includes a saluting face, heart hands, heart fingers, a peeking face, someone gasping. And there are hands reaching out and a hand pointing toward the viewer.

Fresh emoji that don’t involve people include a troll, a full or empty bird nest, bubbles, coral, beans, a playground slide, and many more.

Plus, emoji fans get more inclusivity options, including additional skin tones for handshakes. And a pregnant man.

These are all the new emoji coming in 2022
These reference designs show what emoji will debut in 2022.
Graphic: Emojipedia

Adding new emoji ain’t easy

These new emoji were proposed months ago and went through a rigorous approval process before making the cut. The approval process for emoji is complex because devices don’t send pictures to each other — they send Unicode numbers. It’s up to the device to turn the number into a picture. So the sender and receiver must agree on what those Unicode numbers represent.

The most recent list of additions was announced by the Unicode Consortium as part of Unicode 14.0.

It’s not known when the fresh emoji will appear in iOS, iPadOS or macOS. The Unicode Consortium only offers reference designs — Apple, Google, Twitter and other companies that make software using emojis will come up with their own versions. This will probably take into 2022.

One of the additions highlights the sort of problems that can crop up in the process. Not all the platforms agree on what the earlier Face with Hand Over Mouth emoji is supposed to look like. Apple makes it someone gasping but most others have the person covering their face while they laugh. Unicode 14 will fix the problem by adding a gasping emoji.

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