New Emoji Releases

Emoji 18.0 shipped with Unicode 18.0 on 16 September 2026, adding 19 new emoji: 9 new standalone characters — Cracking Face, Leftwards and Rightwards Thumb Sign, Monarch Butterfly, Pickle, Lighthouse, Meteor, Eraser and Net with Handle — plus five skin-tone variants for each of the two thumb signs. It is a small release by recent standards. Phone and computer makers usually take 6–12 months to add new emoji to their fonts, so until your device updates, these characters may show as empty boxes; you can still copy them and they will appear correctly wherever they are supported.

Emoji 17.0 ships with Unicode 17.0, adding 163 new emoji characters from 7 new standalone codepoints plus new ZWJ sequences. Key additions include the Distorted Face, Fight Cloud, Orca, Hairy Creature, Trombone, Landslide, and Treasure Chest, along with expanded Ballet Dancer, People with Bunny Ears, and People Wrestling sequences with full skin tone and gender variants.

Emoji 16.0 ships with Unicode 16.0, adding 8 new emoji characters from 7 new codepoints plus one new flag sequence. Key additions include the Face with Bags Under Eyes, Fingerprint, Leafless Tree, Root Vegetable, Harp, Shovel, Splatter, and the Flag of Sark.

Emoji 15.1 ships with Unicode 15.1, adding 118 new emoji characters entirely through ZWJ sequences — no new standalone codepoints. Key additions include Phoenix, Lime, Brown Mushroom, Broken Chain, Head Shaking Horizontally and Vertically, plus new gender-neutral family emojis and direction-specifying variants for six people emojis (walking, kneeling, with white cane, in wheelchairs, and running).