9 new emoji coming in 2027, from pickles to meteors

Ahead of World Emoji Day, Unicode Emoji Subcommittee chair Jennifer Daniel has previewed nine designs headed for phones as part of Emoji 18.0, and not all of them are brand new. 

Some are corrections to designs that quietly drifted off course over the years.

New emoji coming in 2027

The clearest fix involves the Comet emoji, which originally launched as a blue streak of ice but was redrawn by some vendors into a red-hot rock burning through the atmosphere. Daniel argues those are two different concepts entirely: one is a wish; the other is an extinction event.

Emoji 18.0 resolves that by giving Meteor its own codepoint. Vendors that had been rendering a fireball under Comet will move that design to Meteor, freeing Comet to go back to consistent blue ice across every platform.

Cucumber and Pickle are being split into distinct emoji, as are blue and orange butterflies, addressing years of inconsistent rendering where the same character looked different depending on which phone sent it.

Among the fixes, there are five new ideas that are being added to the emoji family. The Lighthouse can be considered an easy-to-understand guide image, while the Eraser concept is more focused on the idea of eliminating the error of a previously sent message.

The leftwards and rightwards thumb signs are two additional gestures that complement the currently existing one of a pointing finger; they both have an informal level of "Look at this guy." Another emoji is a net, with its possible meanings going from bug-catching to taking something out of the internet mess.

Cracking Face is probably the most emotional emoji, as it attempts to show a contrast between the well-composed public image and the reality of the person that is falling apart – a more advanced version of Melting Face.

The release date of emoji 18.0 is expected to be September 2026, when the proposal will be finally accepted by the Unicode Consortium and will be implemented in three separate ways by Apple, Google, and Samsung. According to the current schedule, the majority of people will have access to Emoji 18.0 on Android only in late 2026 and in early 2027 on iOS.