How an Emoji Becomes an Emoji

The journey, in one chart

Before we walk through each step, here's what the full journey looks like for a typical year. The widths are proportional to the number of emoji at each stage, so the attrition jumps out.

Anchored on Emoji 15.0's 31 approved emoji. Unicode doesn't publish exact submission volumes, so "Submissions" and "Formal proposals" are editorial estimates. The approval and shipping stages are real. "Above-median use" vs "Long tail" reflects Unicode's own frequency data: only a small fraction of each year's additions end up in everyday typing.

OK, now the walkthrough. Seven steps, one per section.

Step 1: The idea

Anybody can propose an emoji. That's not a slogan, it's the actual rule. The Unicode Consortium doesn't charge submission fees and doesn't require membership. You could write one tonight.

In practice, the people who've actually gotten emoji approved are a strange mix. Two friends texting about dumplings. A 15-year-old student in Berlin. An 11-year-old who won a design contest. Taco Bell's marketing team. Electrify America's comms department. Academics. Emoji activists. Professional designers. A Durex proposal for World AIDS Day. None of these people had any special standing. They all started with the same step: noticing something was missing.

The unlock for most successful campaigns has been Emojination, an activist collective founded in 2015 by Yiying Lu and Jenny 8. Lee after the dumpling saga. Emojination is not an official organisation. In the words of its founders, it's "just a Slack channel and people writing proposals". But those people have shepherded over 100 emoji through the process, including hijab, bubble tea, llama, mosquito, mirror, ladder, beaver, hippopotamus, and interracial couple. When you see a community-authored emoji in your keyboard, there's a good chance Emojination helped.

Step 2: The proposal document

This is the part that weeds most people out. A serious proposal is not a one-line email. It's a 6-to-10 page PDF with evidence, frequency data, sample designs at two pixel sizes, and careful arguments against every reason the committee might reject it. Unicode publishes detailed guidelines that read like academic submission rules.

The core of any proposal is a case that the emoji will actually get used. The Emoji Subcommittee's selection factors are meant to be objective, but they weigh heavily towards three things.

Ranking reflects editorial weighting of how the factors play out in practice. Unicode doesn't publish an official scoring rubric.

The evidence bar is high. "Expected frequent use" in practice means you need Google Trends data, screenshots of people manually typing the word, social-media hashtag counts, and the phrase in dictionaries. Jenny 8. Lee's dumpling proposal ran over 1,000 words and split into eight distinct sections. The hijab proposal included statistics on Muslim women globally and screenshots from messaging apps. Taco Bell's campaign added 33,000 Change.org signatures as supporting evidence.

The design test that surprises most first-time proposers is the 18×18 pixel requirement. Submissions must include both a 72×72 pixel clear design and an 18×18 version, because emoji are rendered absurdly small in chat UIs, and the committee wants to know the glyph still reads at keyboard-picker scale. "If the output looks blurry", the guidelines note, "your design is not suitable". The 18×18 filter alone has killed a lot of otherwise worthy ideas, because fine detail simply doesn't survive.

A proposal also has to clear a long list of auto-rejects. Logos, brand names, specific living people, deities, flags of non-UN-recognised states, text content inside the emoji, and concepts that can already be composed from existing emoji (this is the reason there's no separate "EV" codepoint: Unicode keeps telling people to use 🚗 + ⚡).

Step 3: The Emoji Subcommittee

Your proposal lands in front of the Emoji Subcommittee (the ESC), a working group inside the Unicode Consortium. Its membership is about 80 people drawn from Apple, Google, Microsoft, Meta, Samsung, Adobe, Netflix, plus academics and independent members. They meet weekly and publish quarterly reports as UTC documents (search Unicode's L2 document register for filenames like "esc-report-q3-2023.pdf").

Since 2020 the chair has been Jennifer Daniel, who leads emoji at Google and previously worked as graphics editor at the New York Times and Bloomberg Businessweek. Her first Unicode contribution was standardising gender-inclusive representations. In a MIT Technology Reviewprofile she described the role matter-of-factly: "A lot of it is managing volunteers. There's a lot of paperwork."

The ESC stages a proposal in three rough buckets. First, "declined" proposals get an auto-reject and a short note (most submissions land here). Second, "held" proposals need more evidence, often a rewrite, and come back next cycle. Third, shortlisted proposals advance as "candidates" and are folded into a draft list that typically goes public in early autumn each year. The shortlist is where your emoji lives between approval and a UTC vote.

The ESC is also where corporate veto power quietly lives. In 2016, Apple told the committee it wouldn't support a rifle emoji even if it was approved. The rifle was unanimously killed before it reached the UTC. Apple and Microsoft both lobbied against it citing Olympics imagery and cultural concerns. It remains the cleanest example of how a single member company can override a majority during shortlisting.

Step 4: The UTC vote

If the ESC shortlists your emoji, the Unicode Technical Committee (UTC) holds the final vote. The UTC meets quarterly. For emoji, the September meeting is the headline event because it locks in the annual Unicode release.

As of 2026, six organisations hold full voting seats: Amazon, Apple, Meta, Microsoft, Salesforce, and Translated. Full membership costs $18,000 per year. Institutional and supporting members have lower-weight votes, and observers have none. The UTC prefers consensus, but on contentious issues it votes, and half of all full members constitutes a quorum. In other words: six companies effectively control every emoji that ships to your phone.

What you usually get at this stage is a September announcement naming the year's approved additions. That announcement triggers the next phase, because now six different design teams need to actually draw the thing.

Step 5: The design gauntlet

Here's the part most emoji explainers skip. Unicode doesn't draw the emoji. It only encodes the concept: a codepoint, a name ("DUMPLING"), a short description, and a reference image. Every vendor draws its own version, ships it in its own font, and updates on its own schedule.

Who actually sees each design

A Unicode codepoint is abstract. The thing people actually see is a vendor's glyph. Here's roughly how many people each vendor's art style reaches, weighted by active users on devices or apps that render with that vendor's font.

Numbers in millions of active users as of 2024-2025 vendor disclosures. Overlap is real: a Samsung user browsing Instagram sees Meta's set, not Samsung's. Meta's reach dominates because its set renders inside apps people already use all day.

Who ships first, who ships last

Same codepoint, very different release calendars. Google typically drops Noto designs within weeks of Unicode's September announcement. Apple waits for its next point release. Microsoft sometimes takes the better part of a year. These are typical days between Unicode approval and the first stable consumer release, anchored on the Emoji 15.0 rollout.

The trunk is the count of vendors still waiting to ship; it thins every time a vendor peels off. Horizontal position encodes real days between Unicode approval and first stable consumer release. Google ships almost immediately from its open-source Noto pipeline. Apple and Samsung sync to their OS release trains. Microsoft lags because Fluent updates bundle into Windows feature drops. Twemoji used to ship fast but stopped receiving new designs after X bought Twitter in late 2022.

Apple's Color Emoji font was originally built for the 2008 Japanese iPhone launch by Raymond Sepulveda, Angela Guzman and Ollie Wagner. Guzman famously documented the work in her thesis at Rhode Island School of Design: an internship where she drew hundreds of tiny symbols for what became the default emoji set of the modern internet. Apple has never publicly credited the team that took over after that original cohort.

Google's Noto Color Emoji is open-source, which means you can literally browse the SVG source files on GitHub. Samsung designs its own glyphs for One UI, and the One UI 6.0 release redesigned over 2,500 existing emoji in one pass. Microsoft has Segoe UI Emoji and the newer Fluent set. Twitter's Twemoji is also open-source and now ships on X, Discord, Roblox and parts of WhatsApp.

Different design teams make very different choices, and those choices have occasionally caused public revolt. In October 2016, Apple shipped an iOS 10.2 beta that redesigned the peach emoji to look, bluntly, more like a peach. At that point roughly 93% of its recorded usage was for something other than fruit. The backlash was immediate. Three weeks later Apple released iOS 10.2 beta 3 with the old butt-peach restored. The moral, per our companion piece on the peach rebellion: once users decide what an emoji means, the designer doesn't get to unilaterally change it.

The pistol emoji went the other way. Microsoft switched its glyph from a realistic pistol to a ray gun in 2013. Apple followed in 2016 with a lime-green water gun, and the rest of the industry converged by 2018. A single codepoint (`U+1F52B`) now renders as anything from a water pistol to (on X since July 2024) a realistic handgun again. Same character, seven different political statements depending on your phone.

Step 6: Shipping to your phone

Even after every vendor has drawn the emoji, there's still a gap. Each needs to ship a font update. For Apple that means a point release of iOS/iPadOS/macOS (usually an X.2 or X.3 in the calendar year after approval). For Google it's usually Android's quarterly platform release plus a Gboard font push. Samsung ships a One UI major release. Microsoft pushes a Windows cumulative update plus Teams and Outlook web font refreshes.

The result is that the same emoji shows up on different devices at wildly different times. Emoji 15.0 was approved in September 2022. It shipped on iOS 16.4 in March 2023, on Pixel phones in December 2022 via quarterly feature drop, and on Samsung One UI 5.1 in February 2023. People with older phones that don't receive updates? They see either a rectangle tofu glyph or a fallback to the nearest lookalike.

Modern Android has a clever patch for this. Google's AppCompat emoji library lets apps render newer emoji using a bundled font even if the system OS is years old. Gboard and the X app have been using this since 2021, which is why your grandma's 2019 phone can still show 🪿 goose, 🫨 shaking face, and 🩷 pink heart without a system update.

Step 7: Life after launch

Shipping is not the end. It's where the Unicode emoji frequency dataset takes over. Unicode aggregates anonymised usage from Apple, Google and Microsoft and publishes rough rankings. The distribution is brutal: the top ~100 emoji account for the overwhelming majority of use, and everything else piles up in a long tail.

Share of global emoji usage by rank bucket. Exact numbers aren't published, but Unicode's rank tiering is close to the approximate splits above. The top 10 alone capture roughly a third of all emoji typing.

What pushes a new emoji into the above-median tier? Three things recur. First, a meme moment (💀 as Gen Z laughter, 🫠 as burnout, 🥹 as earnest tears). Second, a seasonal anchor (🎄 in December, 🎃 in October). Third, a platform default: when Apple ships a new emoji as a reaction option, it lands in hundreds of millions of conversations on day one.

A lot of emoji don't catch any of those currents. 🪠 plunger, 🪥 toothbrush, 🪜 ladder, 🪨 rock, and 🪫 low battery all fight for recognition even though they've been shipped for years. Being in the keyboard isn't the same as being used.

Three real journeys

Every stage above feels abstract until you watch it happen to a specific emoji. Here are four: three that made it (dumpling, hijab, taco) and one that hasn't (EV charger, now on its fourth attempt).

The dumpling story reads like a rom-com. Two friends who couldn't find an emoji, a designer's immediate sketch, a 1,000-word proposal that quoted usage data and etymology, and a friendship that turned into a collective (Emojination) that has since helped 100+ other emoji through the process. Yiying Lu went on to design the official Unicode reference images for takeout box, chopsticks, and fortune cookie too.

Rayouf Alhumedhi's hijab story is the best example of why "anyone can propose" isn't just PR. A 15-year-old Saudi student in Berlin, frustrated that a group chat emoji list had no way to represent her, wrote a proposal in 2016. Apple supported it. Google supported it. Microsoft supported it. It shipped in Emoji 5.0 alongside dumpling. The BBC ran a profile. It became one of the clearest examples of emoji as identity infrastructure, which sounds grand until you remember the underlying problem was just "my friends were using emoji for themselves and I couldn't".

Taco Bell's taco emoji is the corporate-lobbying case study. In November 2014 the company launched a Change.org petition, hit 25,000 signatures in eight weeks, then 33,000 by submission day. Unicode approved 🌮 for Emoji 8.0 in June 2015, and Apple shipped it in iOS 9.1 months later. Taco Bell followed up with an "emoji engine" that auto-replied to 🌮-mentioning tweets with one of 600 custom taco GIFs. It's the playbook every brand since has tried to copy, and mostly failed, because the pitch actually has to clear the selection factors.

The EV charger has failed four times. Electrify America pitched it in 2019. Rejected because 🚗 plus ⚡ can already stand in. They tried a simpler design in 2020. Rejected again. In 2021, an 11-year-old named Lucía won a design contest with an entry that was submitted to Unicode. Still no. Even in 2026, as EVs outsell ICE cars in much of Europe, there's no dedicated codepoint. The lesson: the committee interprets "can be composed from existing emoji" aggressively, even when the compound version is obscure.

The ZWJ pivot (why 2024 was so quiet)

Emoji 16.0, approved in September 2024, was the smallest emoji release in Unicode history: seven new codepoints. That wasn't neglect. It was strategy. Earlier in 2024, Jennifer Daniel wrote "Breaking the Cycle", a Unicode blog post arguing that the committee should stop adding new codepoints for variants and start composing emoji from existing ones using zero-width joiners (ZWJ sequences).

The motivating example was family emoji. 26 different family compositions already existed, and accurately representing every possible family combination would need something like 7,000 codepoints. That's unsustainable. The fix, shipping in Emoji 15.1 and onwards, is to generate family sequences from ZWJ-joined person emoji: 👩 + ZWJ + 👨 + ZWJ + 👧 renders as a family. One codepoint is now doing the work of thousands.

The same pivot drove the 118 new additions of Emoji 15.1 (all sequences, zero new codepoints) and kept Emoji 16.0 small. Then Emoji 17.0 in September 2025 swung the other way, approving 163 new characters, because the cycle started including concepts that just didn't compose from existing emoji. The pattern is likely to continue: codepoint approvals stay selective, ZWJ sequences do the work of visibility and representation.

How to propose one yourself

If you made it this far and still want to try, here's the short version. Unicode reopens the submission window each year, typically in April, and closes it in late July. Proposals are reviewed throughout the following cycle, and the earliest possible approval is the September UTC vote about 18 months after submission.

Start with the official Guidelines for Submitting Unicode Emoji Proposals and the downloadable template. Read the most recent round of successful proposals (search the L2 document register for recent "emoji-proposal" filenames) to see what the accepted format actually looks like. Also read the rejection list to save yourself time: no logos, no specific people, no deities, no flags of non-UN-recognised states, no concepts composable from existing emoji.

If you're not a trained designer, get help. Emojination runs a mentor programme that has guided dozens of successful proposals through the process. Their Slack has designers, writers, and former ESC participants who'll review your draft. It's unpaid and volunteer-run.

And manage expectations. Even with a perfect proposal and a great design, most submissions fail. The people whose emoji have made it through describe the process the same way: specific, time-consuming, and faintly bureaucratic. Yiying Lu and Jenny 8. Lee's dumpling took two years. Rayouf Alhumedhi's hijab took one. The EV charger people are going on seven.

If your proposal lands, though, there's a strange payoff. A codepoint is forever. Once your emoji is in the Unicode Standard, every phone on earth that supports Unicode will render it for as long as the standard survives, which is probably longer than any of us will be around to see. Not a bad monument for a PDF.