Emoji 18.0 Preview Reveals Nine New Icons, the Smallest Batch in Years

Unicode’s next emoji batch adds just nine new designs, the thinnest crop of fresh characters in years, and spends most of its effort fixing emoji that already exist. The Emoji 18.0 preview landed on July 15, two days before World Emoji Day, showing off a pickle, a meteor, a monarch butterfly and six other characters due on phones by spring 2027.

The bigger story is what did not survive. A four-year-old proposal for an apple core emoji has now died twice, and its abandoned code point is already glitching on beta Samsung phones, one sign of how messy this process gets before any design reaches a keyboard.

Nine Designs, and the Thinnest Slate in Years

The draft list behind Emoji 18.0 includes nine new emoji concepts. Two of them, left and right pointing thumbs, each carry five skin tone variants, pushing the total draft candidate count to 19.

That is a steep drop from last year’s pace. Emoji 17.0, formally released on September 9, 2025, added eight new concepts: Trombone, Treasure Chest, Distorted Face, Hairy Creature, Fight Cloud, Orca, Ballet Dancer and Landslide. Once every skin tone combination was counted, that batch swelled to 163 total new entries, according to the emoji tracker What Emoji.

• 9 new emoji concepts make up the Emoji 18.0 draft
• 19 total draft candidates once skin tone variants are counted
• 163 total new entries Emoji 17.0 delivered last year with skin tones included
• 3,953 emoji already standardized as of September 2025

Unicode keeps the running tally of every approved emoji on its own site. If all 19 candidates survive to final approval, that count climbs to 3,972, a fraction of the growth the standard saw in earlier years.

What’s Actually Landing on the Keyboard

Jennifer Daniel, chair of Unicode’s Emoji Subcommittee, revealed the finalized look of all nine designs in a blog post timed to this week’s preview. Each one targets a specific gap the standard did not cover before.

• Cracking Face – a face fracturing under strain; Daniel first pitched it as “Cracked Smiling Face” in May 2025, before it replaced a cut “Face With Squinting Eyes” concept in January 2026
• Pickle – a distinct brined pickle splitting off from the existing cucumber, filed in July 2025 by proposal author Elizabeth Scopel
• Monarch Butterfly – a specific orange and black species, an IUCN endangered migrator, standing apart from the generic butterfly
• Meteor – a burning space rock separated from the comet emoji it had been quietly borrowing
• Lighthouse – a beacon built around recovery and guidance metaphors; a similar pitch was rejected back in 2018
• Net With Handle – a generic scoop tool covering butterfly nets, fishing nets and pond dipping, timed to a boom in citizen science apps
• Eraser – the long missing partner to the pencil emoji, which has existed since Emoji 1.0
• Leftwards Thumb – a sideways gesture for swipe left, reject or “that way” meanings, with five skin tone options
• Rightwards Thumb – the mirrored gesture for swipe right or approval, rounding out a four direction thumb set alongside the existing pointing finger

The net’s timing is not random. Citizen science apps like iNaturalist crossed 300 million logged observations from 3.3 million contributors in 2025, evidence Unicode’s reviewers cited that outdoor documentation had outgrown the existing vocabulary.

How an Idea Survives Long Enough to Become an Emoji

Every proposal starts as a filed document reviewed by the Emoji Standard and Research Working Group (ESR, the panel that vets new concepts before a public draft exists). Unicode publishes the document tracking every character added this cycle for anyone to check.

ESR recommendations then move to the Unicode Technical Committee (UTC, the body that casts the final vote). The UTC meets quarterly and can still add, cut or rename a candidate almost up to the moment of approval.

Selection favors evidence over popularity. Reviewers weigh search volume data, documented social media usage and cultural significance across multiple regions, plus a clear argument that a concept fills a gap nothing else covers.

The full pipeline, from a filed proposal to a character on your keyboard, typically runs two to three years. Unicode is already taking submissions for Emoji 19.0, targeting a 2027 finalization, through July 31, 2026.

Comet and Meteor Finally Get Separate Lanes

Some phones had quietly been rendering a burning rock under the Comet emoji for years, blurring a wish on a falling star with a disaster scene. Emoji 18.0 gives Meteor its own code point, so vendors that had drawn a fireball there can move that art to Meteor and let Comet return to a consistent blue ice streak.

Wishing on a star and witnessing an extinction-level event are two entirely different energies.

Jennifer Daniel wrote that explanation for the split in the blog post unveiling the finalized designs.

The same logic applies to food and insects. Cucumber keeps its slot, but Pickle becomes its own character rather than a workaround. Butterfly had been splitting into a blue Morpho on some phones and an orange and black Monarch on others, and the new Monarch Butterfly emoji locks in the specific species everywhere.

The working group’s own recommendation on the swap said the concept “requires additional scrutiny before encoding,” a rare instance of Unicode altering a draft after its initial reveal.

The Apple Core That Never Made It

Not every proposal survives review, and few illustrate that better than Apple Core.

1. Late 2024: Apple Core is proposed for the Emoji 17.0 draft.
2. Early 2025: Apple Core is cut from the 17.0 list and deferred to Emoji 18.0 candidates instead.
3. October 2025: The Emoji Standard and Research Working Group recommends removing Apple Core from the 18.0 draft entirely.
4. January 2026: Apple Core’s abandoned code point, U+1FADD, is reassigned to the new Pickle emoji.

That reassignment created a visible glitch. Samsung’s One UI 8.5 beta still renders U+1FADD as an apple core rather than a pickle, one clear sign of a vendor building ahead of a code point that no longer means what it originally shipped.

The mismatch traces back to how the standard locks in changes. Vendors that build from draft data before Unicode’s beta review closes can end up stuck rendering a design tied to a meaning that later changes underneath them. Samsung, which just reworked its dock and added five-finger gestures in the One UI 9 Home Up update, has historically moved fastest among major vendors on new Unicode characters, shipping all eight Emoji 17.0 additions to millions of devices before Google’s own Pixel line got them.

When Will These Emoji Actually Reach Your Phone?

Unicode expects to formally approve Emoji 18.0 in September 2026, at which point the nine designs move from beta into the official chart of newly added characters. Google typically moves first, previewing new art through its Noto Color Emoji font within weeks, and Android devices could carry the new characters by late 2026. Apple’s keyboard usually lags furthest behind, with spring 2027 the realistic target inside iOS 27 or a later point release.

Last year’s rollout shows why that timeline deserves some skepticism. Emoji 17.0 was approved on September 9, 2025, and had still not landed in a stable iOS or Android release by early 2026. Apple finally shipped its versions through iOS 26.4 in March or April 2026, more than six months after approval.

Android 17 launched June 16, 2026 without the new characters or Google’s planned Noto 3D redesign. Samsung had already shipped all eight Emoji 17.0 additions through One UI 8.5 well before that, leaving Google’s own Pixel line waiting behind a rival’s phones running its emoji font.

Apple’s spring 2027 window for Emoji 18.0 would land close to whatever iOS release follows the rumored iPhone 20 all-glass redesign, expected as a 20th anniversary overhaul of the device. Unicode’s own numbers put the full trip from proposal to keyboard at two to three years, so a pickle emoji floated in July 2025 landing on phones in 2027 would be right on schedule.

Frequently Asked Questions

What Is Emoji 18.0?

Emoji 18.0 is the emoji specific slice of Unicode 18.0, the Unicode Consortium’s broader annual update to the character standard behind every keyboard. Formal approval is expected in September 2026, after which font makers and phone vendors begin building their own versions of each design.

Why Do the Same Emoji Look Different on iPhone and Android?

Unicode only defines what an emoji means and assigns it a code point, not how it looks. Apple, Google, Samsung and Microsoft each draw their own artwork, which is why a text showing a laughing face on one phone once showed a drooling face on another, a mismatch actress Jessica Chastain publicly flagged in 2018.

Will the Cucumber or Comet Emoji Disappear Now That New Ones Exist?

No. Unicode adds new characters without deleting old ones, so Cucumber and Comet both remain in the standard alongside Pickle and Meteor. Removing a draft candidate before it ships is rare; Apple Core’s cut from the Emoji 18.0 list is one of the few times that has happened in recent review cycles.

Can I Use Emoji 18.0 Characters Before My Phone Updates?

Only in limited betas. Google previews new designs early through its Noto Color Emoji font, and Discord’s Twemoji has added some draft characters, but pasting an unreleased code point on a standard keyboard usually shows a blank box, sometimes called a tofu box, until your device’s software catches up.

Is the Apple Core Emoji Gone for Good?

Not necessarily. Unicode’s committee has not formally banned the concept. Apple Core was left out of the Emoji 18.0 draft after being included and then cut twice, and a proposal that misses one cycle can technically resurface later, though it has no public path back onto a draft list right now.

What Do Unicode’s Emoji Proposal Numbers Mean?

Every submission becomes a numbered document once Unicode’s Emoji Standard and Research Working Group logs it; this cycle’s batch of new concepts ran from L2/25-253 to L2/25-258. Anyone can file a proposal, but it still needs sign off from that working group and the Unicode Technical Committee before it reaches a public draft.

Why Was This Preview Released Right Before World Emoji Day?

World Emoji Day falls on July 17 every year, and Emojipedia has used the date to host its World Emoji Awards since the tradition began. Unicode’s decision to preview the finalized Emoji 18.0 designs just before that date keeps the update inside the same annual conversation as the awards.