Why Do Some Emoji Look Identical? Cucumber vs Pickle and 18 More Pairs

Emoji 18.0 landed on 16 September 2026 and two of its nine additions look almost exactly like emoji that already existed. There is now a pickle sitting next to a cucumber, and a meteor sitting next to a comet.

The reaction was predictable: why would anyone add a second version of something we already have? The answer is that Unicode is not drawing pictures. It is encoding meanings, and two things that look similar can mean very different things. Once you understand that, the emoji set stops looking sloppy and starts looking like a filing system with some awkward history in it.

Unicode encodes meaning, not pictures

This is the whole idea and it explains almost every confusing thing about emoji.

A code point is a slot with a name and a definition. U+1F952 is CUCUMBER. What it looks like is entirely up to whoever draws the font. Apple, Google, Samsung, Microsoft and WhatsApp all draw that slot differently, and none of them is wrong.

So when people used the cucumber to mean pickle for a decade, they were not using the wrong picture. They were using a slot whose definition did not match what they meant, and every platform that drew it as a smooth green cucumber was correctly implementing the standard. The fix is not to redraw the cucumber. The fix is a second slot that means PICKLE, which is what Emoji 18.0 delivered at U+1FADD.

Our full breakdown of Emoji 18.0 covers all nine additions, including the one proposed by a primary school student.

Cucumber and pickle

🥒 the cucumber arrived in Unicode 9.0 in 2016. The pickle arrived ten years later. In between, anyone talking about pickles, gherkins, kimchi cucumbers or anything brined had exactly one option, and it was a picture of a fresh vegetable.

This matters more than it sounds for anyone outside the English speaking internet. Pickled vegetables are a staple across central and eastern Europe, Korea, Japan and the Middle East, and a great many food conversations had no accurate character available. That argument, that a real and widespread meaning has no adequate representation, is the strongest case you can make in a Unicode proposal.

Comet and meteor

☄️ the comet is one of the genuinely old characters in the set. It was encoded long before emoji existed as a concept and only received colour presentation in Emoji 1.0 in 2015.

Astronomically the two are unrelated. A comet is an icy body with a tail, orbiting the sun, visible for weeks. A meteor is a fragment burning up in the atmosphere in about a second. The English phrase for the second one is a shooting star, which is the concept people have been reaching for every time they used ☄️ to mean make a wish or something moving fast.

Practically, though, most vendors draw the comet as a streak with a glowing head, which is what a meteor looks like. Whether the two end up visually distinguishable depends entirely on how Apple, Google and the rest choose to draw the new one. That is the part Unicode does not control.

The thumb signs are a different problem entirely

Emoji 18.0 also added a leftwards thumb sign and a rightwards thumb sign. At a glance these look like a pointless third and fourth version of 👍.

They are not. 👍 points up and means approval. A thumb pointing sideways is a completely different gesture in most places, meaning move over, that way, or in some contexts something considerably less polite. Direction is the meaning here, in the same way that ➡️ and ⬅️ are not duplicates of each other.

These two are also the only additions in the release that accept skin tone modifiers, which is why a set described as nine new emoji is counted elsewhere as nineteen new sequences.

The real reason there are so many near duplicates: 1990s Japanese phones

Here is the part most explanations skip.

Emoji did not start with Unicode. They started as small proprietary picture sets on Japanese mobile networks in the late 1990s, with NTT DoCoMo, au by KDDI and SoftBank each shipping their own. Messages between networks had to be converted, badly, by hand written mapping tables.

When Unicode absorbed emoji in version 6.0 in 2010, it had a hard constraint: every character in every one of those carrier sets needed its own slot, so that text could round trip through Unicode and back without losing information. If DoCoMo had a smiling face and SoftBank had a slightly different smiling face, both had to be encoded, even though nobody designing a set from scratch would include both.

That is where most of the awkward pairs in the emoji set come from. They are not duplicates. They are fossils of three incompatible phone networks, preserved in amber because breaking compatibility was not an option. We go into this period in detail in our complete history of emoji.

The 18 near duplicates you already use without noticing

Every one of these is two or more separate code points with separate official names.

• 😀 Grinning Face and 😃 Grinning Face with Big Eyes. Different releases even: 😃 came in Unicode 6.0 in 2010, 😀 in Unicode 6.1 in 2012.
• 😄 Grinning Face with Smiling Eyes and 😁 Beaming Face with Smiling Eyes.
• 😢 Crying Face and 😭 Loudly Crying Face. One tear versus two, and a genuine difference in intensity.
• 😔 Pensive Face and 😞 Disappointed Face. Almost nobody can tell these apart on sight.
• 💿 Optical Disk and 📀 DVD. Both from 2010, both a picture of a shiny circle.
• ⭐ Star and 🌟 Glowing Star. The plain star is older, from Unicode 5.1.
• ✨ Sparkles and 💫 Dizzy. Related but not the same.
• ❤️ Red Heart and ♥️ Heart Suit. The second is the playing card suit and predates emoji entirely.
• 🤍 White Heart and 🩶 Grey Heart. Added nine years apart.
• 🔪 Kitchen Knife and 🗡️ Dagger. Cooking versus fighting.
• 🌛 First Quarter Moon Face and 🌜 Last Quarter Moon Face. Mirror images with different meanings.
• 💻 Laptop and 🖥️ Desktop Computer.
• 🙁 Slightly Frowning Face and ☹️ Frowning Face.
• 🥲 Smiling Face with Tear and 🥹 Face Holding Back Tears.
• 🍋 Lemon and 🍋‍🟩 Lime. The most recent split before the pickle.
• 🏳️ White Flag and 🏳️‍🌈 Rainbow Flag. The second is the first plus a rainbow, joined invisibly.
• ☀️ Sun and 🌞 Sun with Face.
• 🥒 Cucumber and the new Pickle.

You can check any of these yourself on our Unicode version pages, which list every emoji by the release it arrived in.

Disunification, the official name for splitting one emoji into two

When a single character has been carrying two meanings and the standard adds a second character to separate them, that is disunification. It is rare, because it creates a transition period where old messages carry the old character and new ones carry the new.

🍋‍🟩 the lime is the cleanest recent example. It arrived in Emoji 15.1 in 2023 after years of people using the yellow lemon for both fruits. Note the construction: it is not a new standalone character but a lemon joined to a green square with an invisible joiner, which is how the standard adds variants cheaply. That also means it breaks into two visible pieces on a device that does not know the sequence.

The heart colours followed the same logic more slowly. 🤎 brown and 🤍 white arrived in Emoji 12.0 in 2019, and 🩷 pink, 🩵 light blue and 🩶 grey in Emoji 15.0 in 2022. Each one existed because people were straining an existing character to mean something it did not. Our guide to heart colours covers what each one ended up meaning.

Why the old one is never removed

Unicode has a character encoding stability policy, and the short version is that once a character is assigned it is never withdrawn, and its name is never changed.

The reason is straightforward. Every message, document, database and archive that contains that character would break. A pickle emoji does not justify invalidating a decade of text, so the cucumber stays exactly where it is, and people who have been using it to mean pickle can carry on.

What can change is the artwork. Apple redrew the pistol as a water gun in 2016 and every other vendor eventually followed, without a single code point moving. The slot is permanent, the picture is not. That difference is also why the same message can look meaningfully different on two phones, which we cover in why emoji look different on iPhone and Android.

When you will actually be able to use these

Not yet. Unicode publishing a standard is the starting gun, not the finish line. Each vendor then draws its own artwork and ships it in a system update, which historically takes six to twelve months.

Reporting from Emojipedia and others puts Apple's Emoji 18.0 support in an iOS 28 update expected around spring 2027, with Google rolling support out progressively across Android and its other platforms. Those are estimates based on past release patterns rather than announced dates, so treat them as such.

Until then, copying one of the new characters gets you an empty rectangle. That is not an error, it means your device knows a character exists at that position and has no picture for it. Our guide to emoji showing as a box explains how to tell that apart from an actual font problem.

How to check which character you actually have

If two emoji look identical and you need to know which one you pasted, there are three quick ways.

The fastest is your own emoji keyboard. Search the name, and if your character appears under that name it is the one you think it is. Searching pickle will not find the cucumber.

The second is to paste it somewhere that shows the character name on hover or long press. Most emoji pickers do this, including the one built into Windows and macOS. Our emoji meanings index does the same thing in a browser, with the official name and the release for every character.

The third, for anyone working with text programmatically, is to look at the code point rather than the glyph. Two characters that render identically will always have different code points, and that is the only completely reliable test. A tool such as our copy and paste page will show you exactly what you are copying rather than a rendered picture of it.

This matters more than it sounds if you are storing user input. A database that treats 🥒 and the new pickle as interchangeable will produce confusing search results, and one that normalises them together will lose information that somebody deliberately typed.

The useful takeaway

If two emoji look the same to you, check their names before assuming one is redundant. The name is the character, and it is usually carrying a distinction that matters to somebody even if it does not matter to you.

And if an emoji you are certain exists turns out not to, that is a different phenomenon entirely, which we wrote about in the seahorse emoji mystery. You can browse what does exist on our emoji meanings index, check what is coming on the new emoji page, or see the totals per category on our emoji statistics page.