168 additions, every one of them a person who could already exist
Emoji 12.1 arrived on 29 October 2019 with 168 new emoji and no new characters behind them. Almost the whole release is gender-neutral forms of people who had previously shipped only as a man or a woman: ๐งโโ๏ธ health worker, ๐งโ๐ซ teacher, ๐งโ๐ astronaut and the rest, plus neutral hair variants. Unicode 12.1 itself, published five months earlier, added exactly one character, and it was not an emoji.
| Released | |
|---|---|
| New emoji characters | 0 |
| Total including sequences | 168 |
That single character was ใฟ, the square symbol for Japan's Reiwa era. Unicode published it on 7 May 2019, days after Emperor Naruhito's accession, so calendars, forms and accounting software could print the new era name. A whole Unicode release for one glyph is close to unheard of.
Unicode publishing a standard and your phone drawing the emoji are two separate events, usually months apart. These are the releases that added support.
| Platform | Added in | When |
|---|---|---|
| Apple | iOS 13.2 | October 2019 |
The neutral form of a profession that had shipped only as a man or a woman. It got very heavy use within a few months, for reasons nobody planned.
Useful precisely because it does not specify. Schools and course pages tend to prefer it over the gendered pair.
The neutral chef. Recipe posts had been picking between a man and a woman for no reason since 2016.
Space agencies adopted it quickly, since crew announcements rarely want to lead with gender.
Part of the accessibility set introduced the year before, finally available without choosing a gender.
Hair variants came as man and woman in Emoji 11.0. This release filled in the neutral row.
168, all of them sequences built from characters that already existed. The underlying standard release, Unicode 12.1, added a single character: ใฟ, the square symbol for Japan's Reiwa era, which is not an emoji at all.
ใฟ packs the two characters of Japan's Reiwa era name into one square glyph, the format Japanese calendars and official forms use for era names. Unicode shipped it on 7 May 2019, days after the era began, so software could print dates correctly.
Because that was the hole in the set. Professions had been released as a man and a woman with no neutral option in between, so this update filled in the ๐ง form for health workers, teachers, cooks, astronauts and the rest.
See what arrived most recently on our newest emoji page, check which characters people are using right now in trending emoji, or dig into the numbers in our emoji statistics.
Approval is only half the story. To see which iOS release actually put these on a phone, and when, see iOS emoji updates.