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Who decides which emojis get made?

📓 The short answer

The Unicode Consortium's Emoji Subcommittee accepts new emoji proposals from the public every year and evaluates them based on strict criteria, including how useful, recognizable, and broadly relevant the emoji would be.

📚 The long answer

I'm going to take a wild guess that you've used an emoji today. But actually, the guess isn't that wild 😜 — 92% of the world’s online population uses emojis*.

Currently there are 3,953 emojis when all skin tone and gender variations are included. And more are added each year.

The central emoji authority is the Unicode Consortium, a non-profit organization based in Mountain View, California. The mission of the Unicode Consortium is to make text for every language work across all computers worldwide.

At this point, I'm going to give a short technical explainer on what Unicode is, but if you don't care or already know, feel free to skip ahead to the next section.

What is Unicode?

A computer stores everything as bits (short for binary digits), which we represent as 0s and 1s. But most humans would prefer to read things as words and not binary code, so we need a way to translate natural languages into bits and vice versa.

Character encoding is a set of rules that says, "For this arrangement of 0s and 1s, show me this character." Early on, many computers used ASCII, which is basically a small dictionary that maps numbers into characters.

This is how you write "emoji" in binary using ASCII:

ASCII uses 1 byte (8 bits) per character, which allows for 256 possible values. That's fine if you're using English letters (A-Z, a-z), digits (0-9), and basic punctation, but when people started sending text across the internet, things got messy.

If your computer used ASCII but you were exploring the worldwide web, non-English characters like è, ñ, ö, and ç would show up on your screen as �. We needed something bigger, better, and more unified than ASCII.

Enter Unicode: A single global standard that assigns each character a unique ID, called a code point. When text is stored, an encoding system like UTF-8 (the most common) turns those code points into bytes, usually 1 to 4 bytes per character. That’s far more flexible than ASCII.

Unicode 17.0 defines 159,801 characters, supporting almost all scripts, punctuation marks, and symbols in use globally — including, of course, emojis.

What is an emoji? And how do new emojis get added?

Emojis may look like images, but they are simply just another character in Unicode's repertoire. Each emoji has an assigned code point:

Some emojis are formed by combining multiple code points:

Anyone can propose new emojis to be added to Unicode, but they must pass the strict scrutiny of the Unicode Consortium's Emoji Subcommittee. At a high level, the criteria for selecting a new emoji is that it:

1. Is easily interpreted in a small size
2. Adds new possibilities not already found in the existing emoji set
3. Is already used by large numbers of people

Your proposal (example) must include the proposed emoji's name, keywords, category, along with color and black & white images. You must provide reasoning and supporting evidence that your new emoji:

• Can express multiple concepts
  • Example: 💪 can communicate strength or simply an elbow.
• Can be used with other emojis to convey additional concepts
  • Example: 💦 🧼 👐 can mean "handwashing."
• Breaks new ground
  • Example: Because there's already 🧹, a vacuum cleaner emoji wouldn't add much more substantive meaning.
• Is legible and visually distinctive at a small size
  • Example: 🍺 is recognizable as not just beer but a beer mug.
• Has a high usage level
  • You must include screenshots from various sources, like Google Trends, to support your claim. Petitions, hashtags, or anecdotal evidence are not acceptable.
• Completes an incomplete category (if applicable)
  • Example: 🦂 🦁 🦀 🏹 🏺 were added to complete the zodiac.
• Adds compatibility with a popular existing system (if applicable)
  • Example: 🙄 was added to represent ◔_◔, a popular emoticon on many web bulletin boards.

There are also factors that could exclude your emoji, like if it's overly specific, just a fad, or too open-ended. Click here to read the full criteria.

How do vendors design emojis?

Once an emoji is approved by the Unicode Consortium and assigned its code point, different emoji vendors like Apple, Samsung, and Google create their own stylized version of the emoji.

​According to one insider, each vendor predictably adheres to its own in-house design style. Apple is "the least collaborative and the most secretive," which makes sense given their corporate culture and their dominance in emoji usage.

But there is real value in having emojis look and feel similarly across platforms. In 2015, a research lab at the University of Minnesota conducted a survey to compare how people interpreted different emojis across five major platforms. Among their findings was a huge discrepancy in how Apple's Grinning Face with Smiling Eyes emoji was interpreted compared to other platforms' designs.

This meant that there was significant potential for miscommunication when people used the same emoji across different platforms.

Apple later updated its Grinning Face with Smiling Eyes emoji (😄) to look less like Grimacing Face (😬), but not before it went down in emoji history. Today, Emojipedia states a warning on the Beaming/Grinning Face with Smiling Eyes page:

*Note: The Grammar Police is split on whether the plural of "emoji" is "emoji" or "emojis." But since I say "emojis" in my day-to-day life, that's how I've styled it here.

--- Thanks for reading this week's newsletter! If you have any thoughts, questions, or favorite GIFs, my inbox is always open. Just hit reply to send me a note! :) ​ All my best, Caitlin ​Click here to read five facts about Caitlin​

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​Sources for this week's newsletter​

🌐 Wikipedia article of the week

​TempleOS​

"TempleOS is a biblical-themed lightweight operating system (OS) designed to be the Third Temple from the Hebrew Bible. It was created by American computer programmer Terry A. Davis, who developed it alone over the course of a decade after a series of manic episodes that he later described as a revelation from God. TempleOS is an example of coding as an art form....
​
Davis proclaimed that the system's features, such as its 640×480 resolution, 16-color display, and single-voice audio, were designed according to explicit instructions from God. It was programmed with a custom JIT variant of C (named HolyC) in place of BASIC, and included an original flight simulator, compiler, and kernel."

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👀 Catch up on other curious questions

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• ​Why do we scratch our heads when we think?​​
• ​Why do we say "make a beeline"?​​

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