News

New Emojis Are Here, And They're Epic

by Julie Alvin

The new emojis for iOS 9.1 are here, and everyone who's been wondering why on Earth there is what appears to be a "sensible loafer" emoji but no cheese or taco emoji can rest easy. Your formal petitions and strongly-worded letters to the Official Commission of Millennial Texting have paid off. The newest crop of emoji, which you can obtain by updating the operating system on your phone, includes "over 150 new characters with full support for Unicode 7.0 and 8.0 emojis," and some of the long-demanded favorites have been included in the update. Insert the bottle-popping-cork emoji (which is a thing now!) here.

So aside from the long-awaited favorite food emojis of our dreams, what else do we have to look forward to once we take the (surprisingly long) time to update our iPhone operating systems? There's the eyeroll face (for use when watching the next Republican presidential debate), the middle finger (I will probably wear this one out), the levitating man in a business suit (whut), the unicorn (presumably to be paired with the strike-through emoji when someone asks you to be the third in their threesome), the hot pepper (for use when talking about Martin O'Malley's abs), the gold medal (for when you win a hot-dog-eating contest), and the coffin (for when you are "literally dead").

We first learned which emojis would come with this update Sept. 9, when a developer who was beta testing new Apple software shared the information. Adding to the emoji-citement (what?), on Oct. 11 the Unicode Consortium released news of the top new emoji contenders for 2016 (AN AVOCADO, GUYS). With all of these exciting additions, it looks like maybe we will all be able to communicate without even using any words — at least, when talking about what we want for dinner, that is.

And if you aren't appropriately excited about this? I'll let my emoji do the talking for me.

Check out the entire library of new emoji here.