Life

Feed Your Instagram and Emoji Addictions At Once

by Sara Levine

If you don't agree that emojis are one of the greatest technological innovations of our time, we can't be friends. Emojis are like the Frank's Hot Sauce of social media: I put that sh*t on everything, which is why I'm super stoked to announce that you can now hashtag emojis on Instagram. Instagram for iOS version 6.11.0 is now available in the app store, and Android version 6.20.0 is available in Google Play. Get ready, world — you're about to see a whole lot more emojis from this girl. Also, now you can really put those new racially diverse emojis to use. What a time to be alive.

Hashtag emojis will function like normal hashtags: now instead of just searching for words, you can search by emoji. So if you want to see something funny, instead of searching #funny, you can now search be the "crying-so-hard-I'm-laughing" emoji, which is obviously the only way to go. Like, I guess you could also search by the regular laughing or smiling emoji, but something tells me your results just wouldn't be as good. I also wonder if I cut my time searching for cute animals down drastically by just searching by the appropriate animal's emoji? This could really open up a whole new world for me and my love of puppies, which in all honesty I'm not actually sure is a good thing.

In still-cool-but-not-emoji-related news, Instagram is also introducing three new filters: Reyes, Lark, and Juno. According to Instagram's blog, Lark "desaturates red while punching up blues and greens" and is optimal for landscape photos, Reyes gives you a "dusty, vintage" look, and Juno "tints cool tones green while making warm tones pop and whites glow for vibrant photos of people." I'm actually pretty excited for the new filters, maybe now I'll branch out from Lo-Fi and Valencia (but probably not).

While I can't wait to use these new additions and am considering Instagramming something lame just so I can have an excuse to try them out, I'm still waiting for the day when Instagram will introduce a feature that tells you which of the people you follow liked which pictures that show up in the "explore" section. Namely, because some unidentified friend of mine keeps liking horoscope-related posts that make me roll my eyes, and another one (or maybe the same person, I don't know), keeps liking NSFW pictures, and I want to find out who the offenders are so I can just unfollow them and thus stop seeing those things. But until then, the emoji hashtags and new filters will have to do.

If you want to find me on Instagram, you can just search one of the sushi emojis, because I use those a disproportionate amount.

Images: Giphy (2)