Overview
- The Emoji 18.0 draft names nine concepts: a squinting face, leftward and rightward thumb gestures, a monarch butterfly, a pickle, a lighthouse, a meteor, an eraser, and a net with a handle.
- Ten additional skin-tone variants are proposed for the thumb gestures, pushing the recommended emoji set toward 4,000 characters.
- The candidate lineup may change during Unicode’s review process, even though Emojipedia has shared sample reference artwork.
- If approved, companies including Apple and Google will design platform-specific artwork and deliver support through software updates.
- For Apple users, Unicode 17 is expected with iOS 26.4 around March or April 2026, while Emoji 18 support would likely arrive in an iOS 27 point release in late 2026 or early 2027.