Melting Face, heart hands, and the most quoted emoji set of the decade
Unicode 14.0 was published on 14 September 2021 and produced an unusually high hit rate. The melting face ๐ซ and the saluting face ๐ซก both entered everyday use almost immediately, and heart hands ๐ซถ gave the Korean finger heart its own character. Thirty-seven new code points became 112 emoji once skin-tone sequences were included.
| Released | |
|---|---|
| New emoji characters | 37 |
| Total including sequences | 112 |
The directional hand emoji introduced here, ๐ซฑ and ๐ซฒ, were designed so that handshakes could be built from two hands with different skin tones. That mechanism went on to produce hundreds of combinations in later releases.
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 15.4 | March 2022 |
| Android 12L / 13 | 2022 | |
| Samsung | One UI 4.1 | 2022 |
The standout of the release. Embarrassment, heat, dissociation, or quietly losing it in public.
Acknowledgement with a touch of irony. Rarely used for actual military respect.
The finger heart gesture, already enormous in K-pop culture before it was encoded.
Overwhelmed by something sweet rather than sad. One of the most-used faces of the set.
Watching through your fingers. Secondhand embarrassment.
Feeling invisible or withdrawn. A genuinely novel idea for a face emoji.
Mild scepticism. The polite version of a grimace.
Shock at gossip rather than horror.
The other finger heart, and in some contexts a money gesture.
Direct address. Accusation or recruitment, depending on tone.
Flirtation, anxiety or restraint. Context does all the work.
Built to combine with ๐ซฒ into mixed-skin-tone handshakes.
The mirror of the above.
Lowering, calming, or dropping something.
Offering, asking, or presenting.
A gender-neutral royal, alongside the existing king and queen.
Part of a deliberate expansion of gender representation.
The gender-neutral counterpart.
Fantasy creature and internet behaviour in one character.
Added with reef conservation explicitly cited in the proposal.
Significant across several South and East Asian cultures.
Designed as a pair with the one below for departure and arrival.
Home, family planning, and new beginnings.
A staple food missing from the set for over a decade.
Spilling or serving. Often used for the phrase about spilling tea.
Preserving, storing, or an empty container as metaphor.
Childhood and play.
Driving, and a frequent companion to the reinvention idiom.
Rescue and safety, literal and otherwise.
Disco, nightlife, and a surprise favourite among music accounts.
Exhaustion. Paired with the existing battery for a before and after.
Part of the ongoing disability representation work.
Medical imaging, and seeing through a pretence.
Cleaning, bath time, or a light and airy mood.
A protective symbol across Jewish, Muslim and Middle Eastern traditions.
ID, verification, and proof of who you are.
Added so equality could be expressed without borrowing a maths glyph.
๐ซ shows a smiling face dissolving downwards. People use it for embarrassment, for extreme heat, and for the specific feeling of holding a polite expression while everything falls apart. It became one of the most-used faces of the 2020s within months of release.
Thirty-seven new code points, which expand to 112 emoji once skin-tone sequences are counted. Apple added them in iOS 15.4 on 14 March 2022, six months after publication.
๐ซฑ and ๐ซฒ exist so a handshake can be built from two hands with different skin tones. Before this, handshake emoji could only show one tone for both hands, which made mixed-skin-tone greetings impossible to represent.
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.