New emojis spotted – but you’ll have to wait a little longer
The world of emojis never stands still: the Unicode Consortium unveiled another batch of images this week. There are some fun newcomers among them. What kind of emojis are they, and when will they be coming to your iPhone?
These new emojis are coming
A total of 19 new emoji have joined Emojipedia ‘s preliminary Emoji 18.0 list , including a monarch butterfly as a colorful alternative to the existing butterfly emoji. And also:
- A smiley with squinted eyes
- A hand gesture with a thumb to the left
- A hand gesture with a thumb to the right
- A pickle
- A lighthouse
- A meteor
- An eraser (to erase pencil marks from paper)
- A net with a handle, like the one you use to catch insects
New skin color variations are also being proposed for existing characters. If all goes according to plan, the official emoji count will soon reach nearly four thousand. Quite impressive for something that once started with a smiling yellow face.
Still a long wait
Important note: these emoji currently only exist on paper. The list isn’t final and can be updated until September 2026. Only then can companies like Apple start working on their own designed versions, which will likely appear on your device via iOS 27 in late 2026 or even early 2027 .
Until then, we’ll even have to wait for a previously announced batch of new emojis . This is expected to happen with iOS 26.4. It will bring the emoji from Unicode 17 to your iPhone in March or April 2026 – and there are already a few gems among them, like an apple core, a treasure chest, and an orca.