New Emojis in 2025 & 2026: Everything You Need to Know About Emoji 17.0 🆕

Every September, the Unicode Consortium gathers, debates, and formally approves a new batch of emoji for the world's keyboards. And every year, the internet lights up. "Wait, there's a WHAT emoji coming?!" For 2025 and looking ahead to 2026, the emoji news has been genuinely interesting — with some unexpected additions, a historic removal, and a clearer picture than ever of where the emoji standard is heading.

Here's everything you need to know, all in one place.

Emoji 17.0: What Was Officially Approved (September 2025)

Unicode 17.0 was formally released on September 9, 2025, formalising a draft emoji list that had been in development since late 2024. The final approved set includes 163 new emoji — though a notable last-minute change did occur: the Apple Core emoji (🍏✂️ style concept), which had been on the draft list, was withdrawn before final approval and deferred to a future release. It was the first time a draft emoji had been removed from a list since 2017.

The seven brand-new standalone emoji codepoints approved in Emoji 17.0 are:

• 🌀 Distorted Face — a warped, surreal smiley expression that immediately became a favourite for expressing existential dread or chaos
• 💥 Fight Cloud — the comic-book-style cloud of conflict, perfect for expressing dramatic disagreements
• 🩰 Ballet Dancer — also approved as gender-neutral, with skin tone modifier support
• 🦣 Hairy Creature — a Bigfoot/Yeti-inspired shaggy beast that won considerable fan enthusiasm during the draft phase
• 📦 Treasure Chest — a classic wooden chest with golden clasp, immediately useful for gaming, gifts, and general excitement
• Plus two additional codepoints from the approved list covering new concepts in the natural and symbolic categories

Beyond the new standalone emoji, Emoji 17.0 also added gender-neutral ballet dancer sequences and new skin tone modifier combinations for existing emoji — including 👯 People With Bunny Ears and 🤼 People Wrestling — greatly expanding representation in those categories.

Emoji 16.0 Recap: The Tiny Batch That Came Before

To understand Emoji 17.0 in context, it helps to know what came immediately before. Emoji 16.0, approved September 10, 2024, added just seven new emoji codepoints — the smallest batch in Unicode emoji history. This was entirely deliberate: the Unicode Emoji Subcommittee has been intentionally reducing the rate of new emoji additions, acknowledging that the set was growing faster than it could meaningfully expand expression.

The Emoji 16.0 additions included 🫩 Face with Bags Under Eyes, 🫟 Splatter, 🫆 Fingerprint, 🪿 Goose (wait, actually that was 15.0...) — let's be precise: 🫩 Face with Bags Under Eyes, 🫟 Splatter, 🫆 Fingerprint, 🌳 Leafless Tree, 🪻 Hyacinth's companion the Shovel, 🪗 Harp, and 🏴 Flag for Sark (the small Channel Island that received its emoji flag through an automatic mechanism rather than a standard proposal — the first new national flag emoji approved this way since 2015).

When Will Emoji 17.0 Actually Appear on Your Phone?

This is the question everyone always wants answered — and the honest answer is: it depends on your phone and platform. Unicode approval is just step one. After that, each platform (Apple, Google, Samsung, WhatsApp, Discord, Microsoft) has to design and implement their own versions, then push those to users via software updates.

Based on historical rollout patterns, here's the expected timeline for Emoji 17.0:

• September 2025: Google previewed Emoji 17.0 designs via its Noto Color Emoji font files immediately after Unicode approval. Discord's Twemoji offshoot added them shortly after.
• Jan/Feb 2026: WhatsApp began rolling out Emoji 17.0 support for Android users.
• Early 2026: Samsung One UI update expected to debut support. Google beginning progressive rollout across Android platforms.
• Spring/Summer 2026: Apple iOS update expected to bring Emoji 17.0 to iPhones (based on Apple's historical pattern of releasing emoji support in a major iOS update in the first half of the year following Unicode approval).
• Summer/Fall 2026: Facebook/Meta, Microsoft Windows expected to complete their rollouts.

If you're reading this in early 2026, you may already have some of these emoji on your Android device — and your iPhone may still be waiting. Patience is part of the emoji experience.

Looking Ahead: Emoji 18.0 (Expected September 2026)

The draft list for Emoji 18.0 — the batch expected to be approved in September 2026 and begin rolling out in late 2026 and through 2027 — was revealed by the Unicode Consortium in early 2026. It's a notably small list: approximately 19 new emoji concepts. If all are approved, it would bring the total Unicode-recommended emoji to around 3,972.

Highlights from the current Emoji 18.0 draft include a proposal to replace the Face with Squinting Eyes emoji with a new "Cracking Face" concept — which, if approved, would mark a relatively rare instance of an existing emoji concept being updated rather than simply adding something new. The Apple Core emoji, which was removed at the last minute from Emoji 17.0, has also been deferred from the 18.0 draft, effectively pausing its progress toward inclusion indefinitely.

The Bigger Picture: Where Is Emoji Headed?

The trend toward smaller annual emoji batches is clear and intentional. The Unicode Consortium has signalled that it sees AI-generated emoji and platform-specific emoji systems (like Apple's Genmoji) as taking pressure off the standardised Unicode set. Their focus is shifting toward ensuring that the core emoji vocabulary — the universal, cross-platform set that everyone shares — remains robust and meaningful, rather than endlessly expanding into increasingly niche territory.

If all 19 of the Emoji 18.0 proposals are approved, the total emoji count will be just under 4,000. Given that the total was under 1,000 a decade ago, that's still remarkable growth. But the era of hundreds of new emoji per year is firmly behind us.