Emojis please!

56 new emojis will soon be on the way

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New emojis? What?

The Unicode Consortium announced Tuesday the release of Version 10.0 of the Unicode Standard — the coding system used around the world that includes scripts and characters. In it, are 56 new emojis. **Insert screams of excitement here**
While the previous version may have brought such gems as bacon, avocado, and a person taking a selfie, the latest update includes more people and expressions like a bearded man (Hello, #beardgang!), a “shhhhhhh” face, and an exploding head. Mindblowing, right? They even have more cultural and society-driven emojis like a woman in a headscarf or hijab and a breast-feeding woman.
You may have to wait until they roll out on your Apple and Android devices, but to preview how they’ll look on Facebook, Twitter, and Google, you can check out the full list here.

How do emojis work anyway?

Great question. Well, emojis are essentially just coded characters that look like pictures. So, when Unicode rolls out new ones, they have to be incorporated into the systems we use. That’s why although the codes are out now, it’ll take a while for folks like Apple to start using it.

All modern operating systems support emoji characters. But, what you see can be different. If you have, let’s say an iPhone, and are texting someone with an Android, the emojis can look pretty different and might not show up when you text each other. It’s all up to the developers of that particular medium to determine what emojis to use and how.

Is it really international?

Ummm, yeah. And believe it or not, the U.S. isn’t even the most emoji-crazed country. We’re not even in the Top Five, according to Instagram data compiled by Quartz. But, check this: they didn’t even really start here. (We don’t even go here.)

via GIPHY

Unicode says Japanese mobile phones got emojis in 1999. They were super popular, but each mobile phone carrier developed different sets of emojis that was kinda the same with some parts not being compatible at all. In 2006, Google decided to start converting Japanese emoji to Unicode. Note that Unicode was already around to convert text, but this was the start of making pictures into a language that devices everywhere could understand. The symbols and all of that good stuff were approved in 2007, and the rest is history.

Top image via Giphy