The Emoji Approval Process: How New Emojis Actually Get Made

New emojis don't appear out of nowhere — every single one goes through a formal proposal and review process managed by the Unicode Consortium, the same nonprofit organization responsible for standardizing text characters across every writing system in the world.

Anyone can submit a proposal, but it needs to include a fairly detailed case: why the emoji is needed, how distinct it is from existing emoji, expected frequency of use, and evidence of demand (often including search or usage data for the underlying word or concept).

Proposals go through the Consortium's Emoji Subcommittee, which reviews them against a published set of selection factors — including whether the concept is already well covered by existing emoji, whether it's likely to be used frequently, and whether it risks being overly narrow or tied to a single brand or fictional character (which is generally disqualifying).

Once a batch of proposals is approved, they're published in a new Unicode version — released roughly once a year — after which individual platforms like Apple, Google, and Samsung each design and roll out their own visual version of the new characters, on their own separate timelines.

This is why a brand-new emoji sometimes shows up as a blank box or a placeholder image on your phone for months after its official approval: the underlying character exists in the standard, but your specific device hasn't shipped a font update with a matching design yet.

Not every approved proposal turns out to be a crowd favorite — see our roundup of some of the stranger entries Unicode has approved for proof that the bar for inclusion is about genuine need, not universal appeal.

For the full history of how the standard reached its current size, our piece on emoji history covers the earlier, less formal era before this review process existed at all.