The 2026 emoji set, led by the Distorted Face and the Orca
Unicode 17.0 was published on 9 September 2025 and reached most phones during the first half of 2026. The headline count of 163 is misleading on its own: only seven are genuinely new drawings. The other 156 are skin-tone and variant sequences, most of them filling in the people wrestling and people with bunny ears emoji so both figures can carry different skin tones independently.
| Released | |
|---|---|
| New emoji characters | 7 |
| Total including sequences | 163 |
This release says a lot about where emoji design has gone. Seven new pictures, and more than 150 sequences built from characters that already existed. The Consortium has shifted from adding vocabulary to making the existing vocabulary describe more people accurately.
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 26.4 | March 2026 |
| Android 16 | 2026 | |
| Samsung | One UI (2026 releases) | 2026 |
Reads as glitching, dissociating, or a reaction melting in real time. It landed straight into the same slot ๐ซ occupies.
The first cetacean added since the whale emoji, and the one most requested by marine conservation groups.
The comic-strip scuffle ball. Useful for chaos that is not actually violent.
Deliberately vague so it can serve Bigfoot, Sasquatch, yeti and every regional cryptid at once.
Fills a long-standing gap in the instrument set, and gives the sad trombone its own character.
Joins the small group of natural-disaster emoji alongside ๐ and ๐.
Arrived with gaming loot culture in mind rather than pirates.
The count includes every sequence, not just new drawings. Seven new code points were added, and the remaining additions are skin-tone and variant combinations, mostly for people wrestling and people with bunny ears, so each figure in those emoji can take its own skin tone.
Apple shipped them in iOS 26.4 in March 2026, roughly six months after the standard was published. Apple has used a March or April point release for new emoji every year since iOS 15.4, so the timing was predictable.
A blank rectangle or a box with a question mark means your device has the character but no font glyph for it. The emoji will appear once the operating system updates. Copying it still works, and it will render correctly for anyone whose device is current.
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.