Emoji 18.0 Is Official: All 9 New Emoji and When You Get Them

Unicode approved nine new emoji on September 16, 2026, as part of Emoji 18.0: Cracking Face, Leftwards Thumb Sign, Rightwards Thumb Sign, Monarch Butterfly, Pickle, Lighthouse, Meteor, Eraser and Net With Handle. Counting skin tones for the two thumb signs, that is 19 new sequences. You cannot type any of them yet, and most people will not see them on a phone until 2027.

That is the short version. The longer version is more interesting, because one of these emoji quietly replaced a different emoji that had already been approved, another exists purely to fix a design argument that has been running since 2010, and one was proposed by a primary school student in Japan.

All nine new emoji in Emoji 18.0

Every one of these is a single character rather than a combination of existing ones, which is worth knowing if you build anything that handles text. Only the two thumb signs accept skin tone modifiers.

Emoji	Name	Codepoint	Category
	Cracking Face	U+1FAEB	Smileys and Emotion
	Pickle	U+1FADD	Food and Drink
	Monarch Butterfly	U+1FACC	Animals and Nature
	Meteor	U+1FA8B	Travel and Places
	Lighthouse	U+1F6D9	Travel and Places
	Eraser	U+1FA8C	Objects
	Net With Handle	U+1FA8D	Objects
	Leftwards Thumb Sign	U+1FAF9	People and Body
	Rightwards Thumb Sign	U+1FAFA	People and Body

Artwork above by OpenMoji, licensed CC BY-SA 4.0. Every vendor draws emoji differently, so Apple and Google versions will look nothing like these.

Why the new emoji look like empty boxes

If you copy one of these characters today, you will almost certainly see a rectangle. Type designers call that tofu, and it is not a bug. Your phone understands that a character exists at that codepoint, it just has no picture to draw, so it renders a placeholder instead.

This happens with every emoji release. Unicode publishes the standard, then each vendor draws its own artwork and ships it in a system update. That gap is usually six to twelve months. It is the same reason people kept seeing boxes for months after the last few releases, and it is why we use images rather than live characters throughout this article.

Google moved unusually fast this time. It previewed its designs through the Noto font on September 15, one day before the standard was even published. If you want the background on why the same emoji looks different everywhere, we cover that in why emojis look different on iPhone and Android.

The pickle is the story everyone latched onto

Of the nine, the pickle got the press. Part of that is the obvious joke, which several outlets made within hours of the announcement and which we will leave alone.

The serious argument in the proposal is better than you would expect. Elizabeth Scopel, who submitted it, made the case that a pickle is genuinely not a cucumber. Jennifer Daniel, who chairs Unicode's emoji working group, put it more memorably on the Unicode Blog in July 2026: “A cucumber is crisp, hydrated, and best served at the spa. A pickle has seen things. It has undergone a chemical transformation.”

The proposal also pointed at a real gap in the emoji vocabulary. There is no good way to say you are in a tricky situation, and English has handed us the phrase “in a pickle” for exactly that. Add pickleball, the Christmas pickle tradition, Indian achaar, and the fact that plenty of cultures pickle plenty of things, and the case stops looking like a gag.

One detail nobody mentions: the pickle took over codepoint U+1FADD, which had been reserved for an apple core. Unicode approved the apple core in October 2025, then removed it from the pipeline before release. The pickle moved into the empty slot.

Cracking Face replaced an emoji that was already approved

This is the oddest thing in the release, and most coverage has missed it.

In October 2025, Unicode approved a character called Face With Squinting Eyes at U+1FAEB. It was meant to read as skeptical, suspicious, a bit “sus”. Plenty of tech sites, MacRumors and AppleInsider among them, ran headlines in January 2026 about the squinting face coming to iPhone. Those headlines were accurate when published.

Then in January 2026, Unicode decided the character needed further scrutiny and swapped it out, keeping the same codepoint but changing the name and meaning to Cracking Face. It even moved category, from the neutral and skeptical faces to the smiling ones.

The new meaning is a face whose composure is visibly breaking. The proposal describes the distance between the public persona and the private truth, the polite “I'm fine” that is doing a lot of work. There is a nice ambiguity built in, because cracking up means both falling apart and laughing helplessly.

Unicode has not published a reason for the substitution, so if you see a confident explanation somewhere, treat it with suspicion. What we can say is that the squinting face concept did not ship.

Meteor exists to settle a thirteen-year-old argument

Meteor is not really a new idea. It is a fix.

Back when the comet emoji was first drawn, it was a blue icy thing streaking across space. At some point a vendor redrew it as a burning rock hitting the atmosphere, and everyone else followed. Daniel's account of this is blunt: “Originally, when the Comet emoji first debuted it was drawn as a sparkling blue ball of ice moving across the galaxy. Then a rando changed the design to a red-hot rock entering the atmosphere. THESE ARE NOT THE SAME.”

Giving the fiery version its own codepoint lets the comet go back to being a comet. Unicode has explicitly recommended that vendors move their meteor-looking artwork to the new character and redraw the old one.

Monarch Butterfly solves the same class of problem. The existing butterfly is drawn as a blue Morpho by some vendors and a monarch by others, which means people have been sending each other different butterflies without knowing it. The two carry different cultural weight, the monarch especially around Día de los Muertos and migration. Splitting them apart is housekeeping, not novelty. You can browse the current set on our animal emoji page.

Two thumbs, pointing sideways

Leftwards Thumb Sign and Rightwards Thumb Sign look redundant next to the thumbs up we already have. They are not, and the reasoning is the most thought-through part of this release.

Daniel Nathaniel Olobayo's proposal makes four separate arguments. Pointing with an index finger is rude in a lot of places, including Cambodia, Malaysia, South Korea, Nigeria and Nicaragua, so a sideways thumb is the polite way to indicate a person or a thing. It is the “get a load of this guy” gesture. It is how hitchhiking actually works, with the thumb angled in the direction you want to travel, which a plain thumbs up cannot show. And it appears as a component in American Sign Language, in signs including forget, aunt and yesterday.

Direction is the entire point, which is why both a left and a right version exist and why both accept skin tones like other hand gestures. If hand emoji interest you, our guide to hand and gesture emoji covers the existing set, and the full range lives on the people and body page.

The eraser came from a primary school in Japan

Emoji proposals are usually written by designers, linguists and companies. The eraser was submitted by Karin Nakagawa, a student at Kansai University Elementary School, in April 2024.

The design reasoning is practical. It follows the shape of the MONO eraser, which anyone who has sat in a Japanese classroom will recognise instantly, and it lines up with the eraser icons in Photoshop, Office and Procreate. It has been filed next to the memo emoji rather than with art supplies, which fits how people will actually use it: undo, correction, scrubbing something out.

Net With Handle has the opposite story. It was proposed in January 2020 by Emojination, the group behind a lot of successful emoji campaigns, and sat in the queue for six years. The arguments were butterfly collecting, citizen science, and, inevitably, SpongeBob.

Lighthouse rounds out the set. The proposal counted roughly 18,600 lighthouses in OpenStreetMap data, and leaned on the metaphor as much as the building: guidance, warning, a fixed point when everything else is moving. It has been filed with water transport rather than buildings. Our travel and places page has the rest of that category.

Why only nine?

Nine feels small, and people have noticed. The trend is real but less dramatic than it looks. Emoji 14.0 had 37 new base characters. Emoji 15.0 had 21, Emoji 16.0 had 8, and Emoji 17.0 had 8. On that curve, nine is a slight increase rather than a decline.

Unicode is open about the reason. Its own proposal guidance says that a very small percentage of submissions advance, that fewer proposals are approved every year, and that many emoji categories are “reaching or are at a point of saturation”. After about 3,900 emoji, most obvious concepts already exist, and the ones left are either too specific or too easily confused with something already encoded.

You can see the whole arc on our Unicode versions page, and if you want the beginning of the story, we wrote up the complete history of emoji separately.

When will your phone actually support them?

Nobody has committed to a date. The figures below are Emojipedia's projections based on past release patterns, and they have a decent record, but they are estimates.

Platform	Estimated support
Google, Samsung, WhatsApp	Early 2027
Apple (iOS 28)	Around March or April 2027
JoyPixels	Mid 2027
Microsoft (Windows 11)	Late 2027

Worth noting that earlier coverage in January said iOS 27 and late 2026. That estimate has since moved. If you want to know what is already on your keyboard today rather than next year, our new emojis page tracks current support, and the complete 2026 emoji list covers what shipped this year.

What happens next

The submission window for the next round closed on July 31, 2026, and Unicode says submissions reopen in 2027. Anyone who submitted this year should hear back by November 30, 2026.

Emoji 19.0 should land alongside Unicode 19.0 in September 2027. There is no candidate list yet, and any site showing you one is guessing. There is also a proposal to shift the submission window earlier in the year, from April through July to February through May, but nothing changes before 2027.

In the meantime, the emoji you can actually use are the ones already on your keyboard. Our emoji meanings section explains what each one is really used for, and the copy and paste tool is the quickest way to grab one. For the previous batch of faces, our guide to Unicode 15, 16 and 17 faces picks up where this leaves off.

The short answer

Nine new emoji, approved September 16, 2026. Two of them fix old design mix-ups rather than adding anything new. One replaced a character that had already been approved and never shipped. One came from a primary school student, and one waited six years in a queue. None of them will work properly on your phone until sometime in 2027, and until then you will mostly see boxes.