To celebrate World Emoji Day, Apple once again is introducing new emoji, coming this fall, bringing even more diversity and inclusivity to the keyboard.
In a major update to the Holding Hands emoji—typically used to represent couples and relationships, you will now be able to select any combination of skin tone, and gender, to personalise the people holding hands. The new update opens up more than 75 possible combinations.
The emoji keyboard will also now feature disability-themed emoji—a new guide dog, an ear with a hearing aid, wheelchairs, a prosthetic arm and a prosthetic leg. Apple proposed to the Unicode Consortium last year to introduce more disability-themed emoji.
And there’s even more fun emoji coming your way, including additional emoji categories. There’s a new smiley face for yawning, a one-piece swimsuit (gotta love that), new food items including waffle (yum!), falafel, butter and garlic; and new animals like the sloth, flamingo, orangutan and skunk.
A total of 59 new emoji designs will be available this fall, to roll out with a free software update for iPhone, iPad, Mac and Apple Watch.
What? No Tim Cook emoji?
There are thousands of emoji currently available including emotive smiley faces, gender-neutral characters, more professions, various clothing options, food types, animals, mythical creatures, and more.
New emoji are created based on the approved characters in Unicode 12.0.
