For those of you who have been eagerly awaiting the age of the bagel emoji, your dreams have come true. The Unicode Consortium, the nonprofit group in charge of character encoding schemes and standards, has just released the finalized list of new emojis which will be coming to iPhones and Androids in the second half of 2018.
While some of the new emojis were created by popular demand (i.e. superheroes, dynamite, kangaroos, and most importantly, bagels) a significant percentage of them were created in order to foster ‘inclusivity’ among the community.
According to Jeremy Burge of the Unicode Emoji Subcommittee:
“People felt like they were getting left out. Even though I don’t have red hair myself, that was the number one request we got for the last two years running. So, I felt like I should step up and try and make that happen.”
In order to make it up to their consumer base, the committee has created a variety of new people emojis, featuring options for red hair, white hair, and even no hair at all.
But regardless of the intent, the addition of the 157 new characters means that the emoji rolodex now totals to 2,823 emojis. Although this may be exciting news for some, others are concerned that this constant increase of emojis is negatively affecting people’s ability to communicate with proper language. They argue that, due to the ever-widening range of emotions and ideas that can be presented via emoji, we may eventually see a time where communication becomes hieroglyphic.
What do you think? Are you all about adding new emojis to the collection? Or do you think the current wide range of emojis is more than enough?