Bacon, Selfie, and 36 Other Brand-New Emoji Are On the Way

It has already been a great year for emoji. Apple recently began supporting a refresh of certain characters, including more racially and gender-diverse people as well as a few new emoji like an Apple Watch. Now a 💣🐚: 38 brand-new emoji are coming!

Unicode, the consortium of designers and developers who decide which elements of our written language are so important that they should be rendered in pixels instead, has announced 38 new emoji will be making their way to your Instagram comments next year.

And the most important of these is:

According to Yahoo Tech, we might see them around this time next year: “Earlier this month the consortium’s emoji subcommittee finalized the additions and submitted them to members for a vote of approval. The new emoji will be added to the existing set in June 2016 as part of the Unicode 9.0 update if all goes according to plan.”

What’s most interesting is reading through the rationale for why Unicode decided to prioritize these 38 emoji. It turns out that Gawker helped! A post by Sam Biddle envisioning several much-needed new emoji is frequently cited in the release, and some of the images created for that post are included as reference (since Unicode hasn’t decided for sure what these will look like).

Here’s the entire list, with stars by the ones that Gawker’s post is specifically is responsible for:

• Face with cowboy hat
  
• Clown face
• Nauseated face
• Rolling on the floor laughing
• Drooling face
• Lying face
• “Call me” hand
• Selfie
• Raised back of hand
• Left-facing fist
• Right-facing fist (can be paired with left-facing fist for fist bump)
• Handshake
• Hand with first and index finger crossed (one of the most widely requested)
• Pregnant woman*
• Face palm*
• Shrug*
• Man dancing (one of many completing the “gender set” since there’s a woman dancing)
• Prince (again, completing gender set with princess)
• Man in tuxedo (completing bride)
• Mother Christmas (to complete Santa’s gender set?)
• Wilted flower
• Scooter
• Motor scooter
• Octagonal sign
• Clinking glasses (actually champagne flutes)
• Black heart
• Croissant
• Avocado *
• Cucumber *
• Bacon
• Potato
• Carrot
• Fox face
• Eagle
• Duck
• Bat
• Shark
• Owl

[Unicode via Yahoo]