The Unicode Consortium unveiled Unicode 15.0 to the public, which brings 20 new emojis and 4,489 characters (up from 3,633 characters since Unicode 14.0). Unicode 15.0 also includes 11 emoji sequences, ten of which are skin tone modifiers – five for the new Rightwards Pushing Hand and five for Leftwards Pushing Hand – and a new zero-width joiner (ZWJ), aka Black Bird. This means that a total of 31 emoji come to your device.
The new list of emojis includes a pink heart, which according to Emojipedia was the most requested emoji. This Pink Heart emoji is accompanied by a light blue heart and a gray heart emoji. Here is the full list of new emojis:
- trembling face
- light blue heart
- gray heart
- pink heart
- Pushing hand to the right (with five skin tones)
- Pushing hand left (with five skin tones)
- Momentum
- Donkey
- Wing
- goose
- Astonished
- Ginger
- Hyacinth
- pea pod
- Folding hand fan
- Hair choice
- Maracas
- Flute
- Khanda
- Wireless
- Black bird
Emoji 15.0 Release Schedule
Now, you shouldn’t expect to be able to try out these new emojis right away. Emojipedia explains that Unicode version 15.0 does not automatically mean Emoji version 15.0 – the two are different. While the Unicode Consortium has approved the final version of Emoji 15.0, early support for the same will not arrive until October-December 2022, when Google and Android platforms will adopt them first. Next year, from January to October 2023, will see support for Emoji 15.0 on Apple, Samsung, Twitter and Facebook, among other platforms.
Meanwhile, Google has already added the latest Unicode 15.0 emoji to its Noto Emoji font, including the monochrome version of the font. In addition to this, Google is also releasing an animated version of emojis and has shared news of the COLRv1 format which allows users to change emoji colors in fonts. Currently COLRv1 is only available on Google Chrome and Edge but will soon be available on other browsers like Firefox.