Emoji 18: The 9 Candidates Waiting for Unicode's 2026 Vote

On January 8, 2026, Unicode published PRI 537: the alpha draft of Emoji 18.0. Nine new emoji are lined up for the September 2026 UTC meeting, and the 90-day public-review window closed on March 31. Barring a cull in the beta phase, this is the 2026 class.

It is a small class. Emoji 15.0 had 31 additions. Emoji 16.0 had 8. Emoji 17.0 had 9. This one, again, has 9 base candidates and 10 skin-tone variants on the two thumb signs, for 19 total codepoints. If everything ships, the Unicode emoji count lands at 3,972, per Emojipedia's tally. The slowdown is deliberate: Unicode's stated policy since 2022 is fewer, higher-bar additions.

Below is the entire roster, pulled straight from PRI 537 (PDF). Every emoji here has a detail page on this site with platform renderings, combos, proposal history, and the social reading. Tap any card to flip between the Unicode sketch and what your device shows today. On most devices, that is a tofu box. In 2027 it will not be.

Copy any of the nine draft emoji (most devices show a tofu box until Emoji 18.0 ships)

[L][R][M][P][E][N]

What's in PRI 537

PRI 537 is the Public Review Issue for the alpha repertoire. Alpha, in Unicode terms, means the candidates have cleared conditional approval at UTC #185 (October 2025) and are now open for any interested party to file objections or corrections. Samsung, Meta, academic linguists, and any member of the public can weigh in. The public feedback form is still archived.

The sketch on every row of the PRI chart comes from Google's Noto Color Emoji font, per the document footer. These are reference designs. Apple, Samsung, and Microsoft are free to draw their own interpretations once the codepoints are locked in.

Proposal gallery

Flip each card to compare the Unicode sketch with your device's rendering.

SketchYour device

Sketch

cracking face

Smiling face with a hairline crack across it. Late swap-in for the cut 'squinting eyes' candidate.

U+1FAEBL2/26-048

No Unicode sketch

leftwards thumb

Sketch

leftwards thumb

A thumb pointing left. Swipe-left, reject, that way. Pairs with the rightwards thumb.

U+1FAF9L2/25-252

No Unicode sketch

rightwards thumb

Sketch

rightwards thumb

A thumb pointing right. Swipe-right, approve, go that way. Completes the four-direction thumb set.

U+1FAFAL2/25-252

No Unicode sketch

monarch butterfly

Sketch

monarch butterfly

Species-specific butterfly: orange and black, migration and immigration symbol, IUCN-endangered.

U+1FACCL2/25-254

No Unicode sketch

pickle

Sketch

pickle

Whole pickled cucumber with a slice cut off. Fills the gap for deli, idiom, and pickleball content.

U+1FADDL2/25-253

Sketch

lighthouse

Red-and-white banded tower with a yellow beam. Approved in 2025 after a 2018 rejection.

U+1F6D9L2/25-256

Sketch

meteor

A proper meteor. Fixes a decade-old design drift where vendors drew meteors for ☄️ comet.

U+1FA8BL2/25-257

No Unicode sketch

eraser

Sketch

eraser

Two-tone rubber eraser, pink and blue. The undo glyph pencil has been missing since 2015.

U+1FA8CL2/25-255

No Unicode sketch

net with handle

Sketch

net with handle

Butterfly-net silhouette, named generically. Covers insect nets, aquarium nets, pond dipping.

U+1FA8DL2/25-258

Sketches from Unicode proposal documents (Noto Color Emoji samples where shown in PRI 537). Click any card to flip.

The nine candidates fall into three groups. Three are gap fills: categories that already had a first emoji and were missing the obvious second (thumbs left and right after 👍 👎, eraser after ✏️). One is a correction: meteor, which fixes a documented design drift where vendors drew meteors when they should have drawn ☄️ comets. Five are cultural picks that cleared the bar after years of trying: pickle, lighthouse, monarch butterfly, net with handle, and the last-minute cracking face swap. This is the smallest class Unicode has approved in three years and the gap-to-cultural ratio is the highest it has ever been, both signals of the tighter bar the Emoji Subcommittee signalled in 2024.

The nine candidates, one by one

Short reads on each, with links to the full detail page. The order matches PRI 537's chart order (by category, then codepoint). Want to check if your phone supports any of them yet? Copy a draft character from the grid above, paste it into Messages or a note app: if you see the actual emoji, your vendor has shipped an early preview; if you see a tofu box, you are waiting like everyone else.

Cracking face (U+1FAEB)

Proposed as "Cracked Smiling Face" by Jennifer Daniel in May 2025, cracking face is a late substitution. The original Emoji 18.0 slot held "Face With Squinting Eyes," which got pulled in January 2026 and replaced with this one. It is a smiley with a visible hairline fracture across the face, shorthand for psychological strain while keeping a brave face on, the polite cousin of 🫠 melting face. The cracking face detail page walks through the swap in full.

[L]Leftwards thumb & [R]rightwards thumb (U+1FAF9, U+1FAFA)

Unicode encodes these together, as a pair, in proposal L2/25-252. They finish the four-direction thumb grid alongside 👍 thumbs up and 👎 thumbs down. The pitch leaned hard on UI vocabulary: swipe-left and swipe-right have been the default gestures for reject and approve since Tinder's 2012 launch hit a billion matches in two years, and neither gesture had a dedicated emoji. Both candidates ship with the full skin-tone range (five variants each), which is why PRI 537's headline codepoint count is 19, not 9. See leftwards thumb and rightwards thumb for the longer reads.

[M]Monarch butterfly (U+1FACC)

Proposed by Amy Lucas Whitaker in July 2025 as a species-specific follow-on to the existing generic 🦋 butterfly. The pitch is openly cultural: the monarch is the longest insect migration on Earth, a sacred vessel for returning souls in Purépecha and Mazahua tradition, a decades-old symbol of the Dreamer and undocumented-immigrant movements, and IUCN-listed as endangered since 2022. Different emoji, different meaning space. Full context on the monarch butterfly page.

[P]Pickle (U+1FADD)

Submitted July 31, 2025 by Elizabeth Scopel as L2/25-253. The codepoint U+1FADD has a weird history: it was originally reserved for Apple Core on the Emoji 17.0 draft list, Apple Core got deferred, and Unicode reassigned the slot to pickle. Samsung's One UI 8.5 beta still renders U+1FADD as an apple core, which is the cleanest visible pre-approval drift in any public build. The emoji itself fills a real gap (no deli emoji, no pickleball emoji) and picks up the 1562-vintage "in a pickle" idiom for free. Full detail on the pickle page.

Lighthouse (U+1F6D9)

Proposed by Thomas Cappelli and Pierre Avinain in L2/25-256. Lighthouse had been proposed before, notably in 2018 by Helen Wallace, and rejected. What won this time: leaning on recovery, mental health, and guidance metaphors rather than pure maritime utility. Unicode increasingly rewards emoji that have strong figurative second lives. The lighthouse page has the vendor sketches.

Meteor (U+1FA8B)

Jennifer Daniel's L2/25-257 is less about adding a new concept and more about fixing a mess. Several major vendors (Apple, Google, Samsung) already draw meteors when they render ☄️ comet. The subcommittee considers that a design error: a comet is an icy body with a tail, a meteor is a falling rock burning up in the atmosphere. The plan is to move the meteor-looking designs over to the new codepoint and redesign ☄️ back to a proper comet. A decade of wrong artwork, corrected in one release. Writeup on the meteor page.

[E]Eraser (U+1FA8C)

L2/25-255 is the simplest pitch in the whole batch: the ✏️ pencil has existed in emoji since Emoji 1.0 in 2015, and the obvious second half of the pair has been missing for eleven years. The proposal design is a pink-and-blue two-tone rubber wedge, the generic school-desk eraser. The big metaphor: "undo," "delete," "erase from memory," and "wipe the slate" are all among the most-used verbs in texting and have never had a one-character visual. Expect heavy breakup and productivity use. See the eraser page.

[N]Net with handle (U+1FA8D)

L2/25-258, named generically on purpose. Most people will read it as a butterfly net, but Unicode wrote the name so it also covers aquarium nets, pond-dipping nets, and any hand-held scoop tool. The timing is citizen-science driven: iNaturalist crossed 300 million observations from 3.3 million observers in 2025, and Unicode's emoji committee increasingly tracks which activities have outgrown the existing vocabulary. Full context on the net with handle page.

Where Emoji 18.0 sits today

An emoji candidate is not one decision. It is a sequence of seven or eight of them, spread across roughly 18 months, with different gatekeepers at each stage. The full lifecycle explainer covers the mechanics. The compressed version, for the 2026 class specifically:

The "current" stage, beta repertoire, is where any last-minute changes happen. The ESR report for UTC #186 is the most recent procedural document covering this batch. Cuts at this stage are rare but not unprecedented. Apple Core, Courgette, and "Face with Squinting Eyes" all died between conditional approval and final release in recent cycles, which is exactly the universe the emoji that never made it writeup lives in.

What got cut along the way

The Emoji 18.0 draft started wider than nine. Two casualties are worth noting:

Face with Squinting Eyes was in the Emoji 18.0 draft from October 2025 through early January 2026, then quietly pulled by the ESR working group and replaced with cracking face. Public reasoning was minimal. Emojipedia's Keith Broni noted the swap on January 8, and the reassigned codepoint (U+1FAEB) is how we ended up with [cracking-face] as a new-in-2026 face.

Apple Core was the other big loss. It held U+1FADD on the Emoji 17.0 draft list, sat there through early review, failed to justify its distinctiveness from existing fruit emoji, and got dropped. Pickle inherited the codepoint for the 2026 cycle, which is why pickle's proposal document still cites the reassignment. See Emojipedia's apple core page for the archived design.

These are not the first cuts and will not be the last. The full Unicode proposals archive lists hundreds of rejected concepts. The pattern: proposals that lean too hard on a single culture or a single brand tend to fail. Proposals that fill a gap in an existing pair, like eraser-next-to-pencil, or that fix a documented design error, like meteor-vs-comet, tend to land.

When you'll actually see these

Ratification in September 2026 does not mean emoji 18 shows up on your phone in October. The rollout is vendor-by-vendor, and vendors move at different speeds. A realistic timeline, based on the Emoji 16.0 and 17.0 rollouts:

Late 2026: Emojipedia and sample keyboards ship reference designs. Noto Color Emoji ships in a Google Fonts update. iOS developer betas sometimes preview the new set.

Early 2027: Apple ships a point release (historically ~iOS x.4) with the new emoji. Google pushes through a Pixel feature drop. Samsung ships in the next One UI release after that.

Mid-late 2027: Microsoft, WhatsApp, Meta, and X catch up. Cross-platform rendering stabilizes. Tofu boxes finally disappear from group chats.

Until then, our smileys category, food & drink category, and animals & nature category give each draft emoji a detail page with live tofu detection, platform fallback images from Noto Color Emoji, and cross-linking to the related ratified emoji. Here is our editorial read on which of the nine is most and least likely to survive the September vote:

Lighthouse and meteor are the safest bets: both have broad vendor support and the meteor fix is technically non-optional (it resolves an active design conflict). Cracking face is the riskiest: it was parachuted in less than a year ago, and last-minute face swaps have a track record of being cut twice in a row before they land. But all nine are more likely to ship than not.

For the full mechanics of how a proposal becomes a glyph, see the how an emoji becomes an emoji deep-dive. For the graveyard of proposals that never made it, see the missing emoji writeup. When the September 2026 vote closes, this post will get a pass to mark survivors and cuts.