Emoji 18.0: All 9 New Emojis and When You'll Get Them

Every September the Unicode Consortium publishes a new version of its standard, and every September the emoji keyboard grows a little. This year's update is one of the smallest in recent memory. Unicode 18.0 added 13,007 characters in total, but only nine of them are new emojis. The rest are mostly historic scripts.

Small does not mean boring, though. A few of this year's picks fix mix-ups that have annoyed emoji users for years, and one of them started life as a completely different face.

Here are all nine, with their official code points from Unicode's Emoji Recently Added, v18.0 chart.

The two thumb signs each come in five skin tones, which is where the "19 new emojis" figure you may have seen comes from: 9 base characters plus 10 skin tone sequences. Unicode's own emoji counts chart puts the new total at 3,972 recommended emojis, up from 3,953 in Emoji 17.0.

A smiling face with cracks running across it. The original proposal by Jennifer Daniel describes cracking as a way to show "an internal rupture", like a brave face that is about to give way. Think of it as the next step after melting face 🫠: keeping it together, barely.

This emoji was a late swap. The original draft list included a Face With Squinting Eyes. In January 2026 Unicode's emoji subcommittee said one of the draft characters "requires additional scrutiny before encoding" and recommended renaming its slot, U+1FAEB, to Cracking Face (ESR report L2/26-008R).

A hand held upright with the thumb jabbing sideways. Unicode's official keywords for it are "point, that, this, grip, neutral" (ESR report L2/25-230). Think "this guy 👉", but with more attitude. It also works for hitchhiking, for telling someone to get out, and as an unsure middle ground between thumbs up 👍️ and thumbs down 👎️.

For years, some platforms drew the cucumber 🥒 emoji so it looked like a pickle. Now the pickle has its own character. In a July post on the Unicode blog, Jennifer Daniel put the difference this way: "A pickle has seen things. It has undergone a chemical transformation." (Unicode blog). Expect it for food posts, and for "we're in a pickle" moments.

The same story as the pickle. The existing comet ☄️ has been drawn in ways that look more like a meteor streaking toward Earth. With a proper meteor available, Daniel wrote, "it forces a reconciliation" between the two designs.

The current butterfly 🦋 is usually blue, based on a morpho. The monarch is the orange and black butterfly famous for its long migration across North America. It gives nature lovers, gardeners and anyone posting about migration season a more specific option.

The three objects are simple on the surface. A lighthouse can mean the coast, a trip, or being a guiding light for someone. An eraser covers school and "undo that". The net is interesting because, as Daniel pointed out in the same Unicode post, it reads as a verb as much as a noun: catching something, or catching someone.

If you glance at the list and think "don't we already have a cucumber, a comet and a butterfly?", you are right. Unicode's own explanation is that these additions separate concepts that different platforms had been drawing differently. Daniel's post says Emoji 18.0 "updates several existing designs to fix these switcheroos without taking away any emoji."

So the old emojis stay, and they should become more consistent once the new ones exist. We covered why the same emoji can look so different between phones in why emojis look different on iPhone and Android.

Unicode approving an emoji is only step one. Apple, Google, Samsung, Microsoft and the rest each have to design their own versions and ship them in a software update, on their own schedules.

Apple usually adds each year's emojis in a spring point release. Emoji 17.0 went into iOS 26.4 in March or April 2026, according to MacRumors. Following the same pattern, 9to5Mac expects Emoji 18.0 to "likely come as part of iOS 27.4 in March or April of 2027."

These are expectations, not announcements. None of the big platforms has confirmed a date yet.

Emoji get the headlines, but most of this release is elsewhere. According to the Unicode 18.0 release page, the standard now holds 172,808 characters. The new additions include three historic scripts: Proto-Cuneiform numerals, Jurchen and Small Seal script.

There is also a security change. The Unicode announcement notes that "sequences of invisible variation selector characters can be used to attack modern AI applications," so the standard now recommends making misuse of those characters visible in text.

An Apple Core emoji had been on the approved list for Unicode 18.0. In late 2025 Unicode's emoji subcommittee recommended removing it before release (ESR report L2/25-230). Being on a draft list is no guarantee.

Emoji 18.0 is small next to 17.0, which added 163 emojis, most of them skin tone and multi-person versions of new people emojis (Unicode, Emoji 17.0). For the full history of how the total has grown, see how many emojis are there, or browse every emoji on one page in our full emoji list.