Google's Emoji Kitchen, launched within Gboard, lets people combine two existing emoji into a single custom sticker — mash Fire 🔥 and Smiling Face with Heart-Eyes 😍 together, for instance, and you get an entirely new illustrated sticker that didn't exist in the Unicode standard at all.
This is technically different from what we usually mean by an 'emoji combo' elsewhere on this site (like pairing Party Popper 🎉 and Birthday Cake 🎂 in a sentence) — Emoji Kitchen generates an actual new illustrated image, a sticker rather than two separate standardized characters sent side by side.
The appeal is obvious: it lets people express something more specific than any single emoji covers, without waiting for the Unicode Consortium's slower, once-a-year approval cycle. A combined Skull 💀 and Loudly Crying Face 😭 sticker captures 'dying laughing' more precisely than either emoji alone.
The tradeoff is portability. Emoji Kitchen stickers only work within apps that support the feature (mainly Google's own keyboard and Android Messages) — send one to someone on a different platform and it may not render at all, unlike a standard Unicode emoji which at least displays as some version everywhere.
If you're looking for combos that work universally across every platform instead, our piece on the best emoji combos for every occasion sticks to standard, individually-sendable emoji pairings rather than platform-specific stickers.
Written by
House of Emojis EditorialEditorial team
House of Emojis is an independent, free emoji reference. Our guides explain what emoji mean, where they came from, and how people use them in everyday conversation.