Emoji Kitchen: The Mashups Worth Trying, From 146,793 Pairs

Emoji Kitchen has shipped 146,793 unique pairings since October 2020. Not every one of them is good. A large number are two things overlaid with no idea connecting them, and the interesting ones are a small fraction of that total.

We counted the whole set from Google's own sticker data to work out where the good ones are, which base emoji are worth starting from, and which combinations are missing entirely.

What Emoji Kitchen actually is

It is a Google feature that fuses a pair of emoji into one drawn sticker. It lives in Gboard, and it appears when you tap one emoji and Google has artwork for pairing it with another.

The critical thing to understand is that these are images, not characters. A mashup is not an emoji in any Unicode sense, has no code point and cannot be typed. It is sent as a sticker or an image file, which is the reason it lands in some apps and silently fails in others, and why you cannot put one in a username or a bio.

That limitation is also why the results are so varied in quality. Every pairing is drawn by hand by Google's design team, so the good ones are good because someone had an idea, not because an algorithm combined them well.

The numbers behind the set

From counting the full dataset:

• 619 base emoji have Kitchen support, out of roughly 1,750 emoji in total. Most of the keyboard has no Kitchen artwork at all.
• 146,793 unique pairs exist across them.
• 159 base emoji pair with everything, meaning they have artwork for all 619 partners.
• The median base has 472 partners, so a typical emoji combines with roughly three quarters of the others.
• 🦗 cricket has the fewest at 273, which is the leanest in the set.
• 43 separate releases between 1 October 2020 and 29 April 2026.

The release pattern is lumpy rather than steady. By far the largest drop landed in late May 2024, bringing 33,128 pairs at once. The most recent, on 29 April 2026, added 43. The feature has clearly slowed, so anyone holding out for a particular pairing should set expectations accordingly.

The best starting points

If you want a mashup that works, start from a base with complete coverage. These pair with all 619 partners, so whatever you combine them with will produce something:

• 🎃 jack o lantern, live since the very first release in October 2020
• 🎈 balloon, also from day one
• 🎊 confetti ball
• 🎁 wrapped gift
• 🎧 headphones
• 🎬 clapper board
• 🎛 slot machine, bowling and the rest of the activities group
• 💋 kiss mark, another launch day base

The pattern is that objects with a strong silhouette got full coverage first. A pumpkin or a balloon has an outline that other things can be placed inside, which is why those were the easiest for the design team to build out completely.

Mashups that genuinely work

Three categories produce consistently good results.

Container plus contents. Anything with a hollow shape combined with something that can sit inside it. 🎃 with an animal, 🎁 with a face, 🎈 with almost anything. These work because the artwork has somewhere obvious to put the second element.

Face plus modifier. Combining a yellow face with an object produces the most legible results in the whole set, because the face provides the frame and the object becomes an accessory. 😎 with a hat, 🤔 with a question mark, and the enormous range of face variants are where most people spend their time.

Animal plus animal. Frequently the funniest, because the drawings have to resolve two creatures into one and the results are often absurd. The frog and the various snakes and cats produce particularly strange hybrids.

What tends not to work is two complex objects. Pairing two detailed scenes gives you a muddle, because neither has room to read clearly at sticker size.

The popular bases, and when they arrived

Debut dates vary a lot, and a base added later has had less time to accumulate partners:

• 🎃 🎈 🎊 💋 👿and 🌜 all launched on 1 October 2020, the first release.Copy
• 🎁 arrived 15 November 2021, in time for that Christmas.
• 🎬 and 🎳 came 3 February 2022.
• 🎧 followed on 1 November 2022.
• 🎆 and 🍣 landed 18 April 2023.
• 🎣 and 🎶 arrived 3 August 2023.

We keep a dated record of every release and which base emoji gained partners in each, broken down per emoji, on the individual hub pages under our Emoji Kitchen section. The full history of how the feature expanded is in the release history.

How the artwork is actually made

Worth understanding, because it explains the quality variation better than anything else.

Every pairing is a hand drawn sticker produced by Google's design team. There is no procedural generation and no model producing these on demand. That is why a pairing either exists at full quality or does not exist at all, with nothing in between.

It also explains the asymmetry people notice. Combining A with B sometimes produces different artwork from combining B with A, because the designer decided which element dominates. In the underlying data each pairing records which emoji was treated as the base, and a fair number of pairs have two distinct drawings depending on the order.

The practical tip is to try a pairing both ways round before deciding it does not work. A mashup that looks muddled in one direction occasionally reads perfectly in the other.

Mashups against combos, and when to use which

These get confused constantly and they solve different problems.

A mashup is one image made from two emoji. It is expressive, it is funny, and it can only be sent as an attachment. It cannot go in a bio, a username, a caption on most platforms, a document, a spreadsheet or a search query.

A combo is two or more ordinary emoji typed next to each other, like 🌸✨🤍. It is plain text. It works absolutely everywhere, it survives copying, and it is what every aesthetic bio on Instagram is built from.

If the thing you want is decoration that stays put, you want a combo and the Kitchen is the wrong tool. Our aesthetic combos by vibe collection is the better starting point, and the cute combos page covers the most copied sets.

Getting the best results quickly

A few things that reliably improve what comes out.

• Start with a face. Faces have the most partners and the most legible results, because the expression survives whatever you merge into it.
• Keep one element simple. Two detailed objects fight each other at sticker size. One simple shape plus one detailed one is the formula that works.
• Try the holiday bases. 🎃 and 🎁 have complete coverage and strong silhouettes, so almost anything you put in them reads clearly.
• Check the reverse order before giving up on a pair.
• Update Gboard if a pairing you have seen elsewhere is missing, since the artwork ships with the app rather than being fetched live.

For specific starting points, the hub pages for the most popular bases list every partner they have along with the date each arrived. The frog, shark and turtle hubs are the most visited, and each sits under the Kitchen section. The underlying glyphs are on the animal emoji page.

Why your favourite pairing does not exist

Four reasons, in rough order of likelihood.

One of the two is not a base. Only 619 emoji have Kitchen support, so most flags, most profession emoji and a large part of the symbol set are simply not in it.

The specific pair was never drawn. Even between two supported bases, the median only covers 472 of 619 partners. Gaps are normal.

Your keyboard is out of date. Kitchen artwork ships with Gboard updates, so an old version will be missing recent additions regardless of what Google has released.

The app does not support stickers. Because these are images, the receiving app has to accept image attachments. Plain SMS and some business messaging tools will not.

Using them outside Gboard

You do not need an Android phone. The pairings are served as images from Google's own servers, so any site with the right URL can display them, which is how our Emoji Kitchen tool works on iPhone and desktop.

The practical difference is in what you can do with the result. From a browser you get an image you can download and reuse. From Gboard you get a sticker inserted directly into the conversation, which is faster but harder to save.

If you want something you can actually type rather than attach, you want a combo rather than a mashup. Those are ordinary emoji placed next to each other, and they work in bios and usernames where a sticker cannot. The sets on our combos hub are built for that, and our mixer guide explains the difference properly.

Where mashups actually send properly

Because the output is an image, delivery depends entirely on the receiving app, and the results are inconsistent enough to be worth listing.

• Works well: WhatsApp, Telegram, Signal, Messenger, Instagram direct messages and Google Messages with RCS. All handle sticker or image attachments natively.
• Works, with caveats: Discord and Slack accept them as uploaded images rather than inline stickers, so they appear as attachments and take up more space in the conversation.
• Does not work: plain SMS without RCS, most business messaging platforms, any text only field, and anywhere with a character limit, since there is no character to count.

The failure mode is usually silent. The mashup either arrives as a full size image when you expected a small sticker, or the send fails without explanation. Neither is recoverable from the sender's side, which is why mashups are a poor choice for anything that matters.

What the gaps tell you

The missing pairings are informative. 🦗 cricket at 273 partners is the leanest base in the set, and the pattern among the other low scorers is consistent: 🧈 butter, 🍶 sake, 🔌 electric plug and 🥂 clinking glasses all sit near the bottom.

What those have in common is that they are hard to draw a joke around. A plug has no face, no interior and no obvious way to merge with a cat. The design team built out the emoji that generate ideas easily and left the awkward ones thin, which is a reasonable use of effort and explains why the distribution is so uneven.

It also means the leanest bases are where the remaining growth is, if the feature keeps expanding. Given that the most recent release added only 43 pairs, that may be a long wait.

One last observation from the dates. The bases added on day one in October 2020 are almost all at full coverage now, while those added in 2023 sit well below the median. Coverage correlates with age rather than popularity, which suggests the team works through partners steadily per base rather than prioritising the emoji people actually combine most. If you want a mashup that definitely exists, an old base beats a popular one.

For the glyphs themselves rather than the mashups, the cat emoji page and ghost emoji page cover two of the most combined subjects, and our popularity ranking shows which bases people reach for first.