Overview
- Emojipedia outlined 19 candidates for Emoji 18.0, comprising 9 new concepts plus 10 additional skin tone variants.
- The lineup remains provisional and may change during the Unicode Consortium’s review.
- Proposals include a squinting face, left- and right-pointing thumb gestures, a pickle, a lighthouse, a meteor, an eraser, a net with a handle, and a monarch butterfly.
- If approved as drafted, the additions would push the recommended emoji set to nearly 4,000 characters.
- Apple would create its own artwork and is likely to ship the approved characters with iOS 27 in late 2026 or early 2027, while Unicode 17 emoji are expected in iOS 26.4 in March–April 2026.