The Missing Emoji: Things Unicode Won't Let You Type

The gatekeepers

Every emoji on every phone in the world passes through one organization: the Unicode Consortium. It's a nonprofit based in Mountain View, California. Its job is to make sure that when you send a 🐻 from an iPhone, the person reading it on a Samsung sees a bear, not a blank square.

As of 2026, six organizations hold full voting seats: Amazon, Apple, Meta, Microsoft, Salesforce, and Translated. Full membership costs $18,000 per year. The rest of us get to submit proposals and hope.

The Emoji Subcommittee meets weekly. It's chaired by Jennifer Daniel, a designer who previously led Google's emoji team. The full Unicode Technical Committee votes quarterly on which proposals move forward. These meetings are closed to the public. There are no livestreams. No public comment periods. Just a small group of people deciding what billions of humans can express with pictures.

How an emoji gets born

The good news: anyone can propose a new emoji, and it's free. The bad news: everything after that takes forever.

You write a formal proposal document. It needs to cover expected usage frequency, distinctiveness from existing emoji, and whether it works at small sizes. You submit it to Unicode. The Emoji Subcommittee reviews it. If they like it, it advances to the UTC for a vote. If it passes, it enters the Unicode Standard. Then Apple, Google, Samsung, and everyone else design their own version of it. From proposal to your phone: roughly two years.

Unicode evaluates proposals on specific selection factors: expected frequency of use, whether people are already searching for it, how many existing emoji could substitute, and whether the design is distinctive at 18x18 pixels. Logos, brands, and specific people are automatically rejected. Deities are off the table too.

The system works. Mostly. But the rejection list tells a different story.

The rejection hall of fame

Some proposals never stood a chance. Others were killed by a single company's veto. Here are the most notable casualties.

The rifle emoji is the most dramatic story on this list. It was technically approved by Unicode in 2016. Then Apple told the committee it would refuse to implement it. Microsoft had been showing a toy ray gun, then switched to a realistic pistol days before Apple went the opposite direction. The confusion forced Unicode's hand. The 🔫 you see today started as a real gun, then every major platform redesigned it as a water pistol.

The EV charger rejection hits differently. Electrify America proposed it in 2019. Rejected. They tried again in 2020 with a simpler design. Rejected again. Then in 2021, an 11-year-old named Lucía won a design contest and her entry was submitted to Unicode. As of 2026, there's still no 🚗 emoji that specifically represents an electric vehicle. The current automobile emoji has to stand in for everything from a gas guzzler to a Tesla.

And the flag ban is permanent. Since March 2022, Unicode has rejected all proposals for new country or regional flags. The stated reason: there are too many possible flag combinations, and adding one creates pressure to add them all. If you're Kurdish, or Catalan, or from any group without a UN-recognized state, your flag will never be an emoji.

The long campaigns that won

For every emoji that got turned away at the door, there's one that got in through sheer persistence. These proposals took years and required organized movements to succeed.

The redhead campaign is the weirdest one. For three years, gingers worldwide lobbied Unicode to acknowledge their existence. A Change.org petition gathered thousands of signatures. The climax: someone showed up at Apple's Cupertino headquarters and handed over the petition on a USB drive shaped like a carrot. In 2018, Unicode 11.0 finally added the 👩‍🦰 emoji. Red hair got its own modifier component.

Tinder's interracial couple campaign was more strategic. The dating app released a report showing that 72% of its users thought emoji should better represent interracial relationships. They gathered 52,000 petition signatures and submitted a formal proposal. Unicode approved new skin-tone combinations for couple emojis in 2019. That's 71 new couple emoji in one update.

The disability emojis came from Apple itself, working with organizations like the American Council of the Blind and the National Association of the Deaf. Apple drafted a 25-page proposal covering wheelchairs, prosthetic limbs, hearing aids, guide dogs, and sign language. Approved in 2019. When the biggest company on the committee writes the proposal, things move faster.

Corporate fingerprints

In 2019, journalists discovered that Ford had spent two years secretly lobbying for a pickup truck emoji. The company used a front person to avoid its name appearing on the proposal. Ford wanted the emoji to look like a Ford F-150. Unicode approved the 🛻 pickup truck in 2020, though the final design doesn't explicitly resemble any specific brand.

But no company has shaped the emoji keyboard more than Apple. In August 2016, Apple unilaterally announced it would replace the realistic pistol emoji with a green water gun in iOS 10. The move was political. It came during a national debate over gun violence. Apple didn't consult Unicode. It just decided.

For two years, the same codepoint 🔫 showed a water gun on iPhones and a real gun everywhere else. Imagine texting "I'll get you 🔫" as a joke from your iPhone, while your friend on Android sees a Glock. By April 2018, Google, Samsung, Microsoft, Facebook, and Twitter had all followed Apple's lead. The water gun became the standard.

Then Elon Musk happened. In July 2024, X (formerly Twitter) reverted its 🔫 emoji from a water pistol back to a realistic Colt M1911 pistol. Musk called the water gun a "woke mind virus." The NRA praised the decision. As of 2026, X remains the only major platform showing a real firearm for this codepoint.

One emoji. Same codepoint. Completely different meanings depending on which platform you're using. That's the kind of fragmentation that happens when corporations drive emoji standards.

The slowdown

Look at the numbers. In 2022, Unicode approved 112 new emoji. In 2023, it dropped to 31. In 2024, it bounced to 118. Then in 2025, the committee approved just 8 new emoji. Eight. That's the lowest number in the history of the emoji standard.

Jennifer Daniel, the Emoji Subcommittee chair, has said publicly that emoji categories are "hitting saturation." The low-hanging fruit is gone. We have 🐻 bear, 🐻‍❄️ polar bear, 🐨 koala. At some point, the argument for one more animal gets harder to make. The bar for inclusion keeps rising.

Meanwhile, public interest in new emoji remains high. Search data tells the story clearly.

"New emoji" peaks every December/January when new emoji ship to phones. "Unicode emoji" spikes in September and October, timed with Unicode's annual announcement cycle. But "emoji proposal" barely registers at all. Almost nobody knows you can submit one. People want new emoji. They just have no idea how to ask for them.

What's still missing

Emoji 18.0 is the next batch in the pipeline, targeted for 2026/2027. The draft candidate list includes 19 potential additions: a cracking face, a pickle, a lighthouse, a monarch butterfly, a meteor, and an eraser, among others. If approved, these would push the total emoji count close to 4,000.

Beyond the official pipeline, communities are still campaigning for representation. There's no dedicated yoga emoji (🧘 is labeled "person in lotus position"). There's no specific sushi roll, only 🍣 which shows nigiri. There's no blue heart that matches every shade people actually use in design work (though 🩵 light blue heart was added in 2023). And the EV charger is still waiting.

Slow, political, and run by a handful of corporations. But also weirdly open. Anyone can submit a proposal for free. Here's roughly what one looks like.

UNICODE EMOJI PROPOSAL
========================================

Name: UNTITLED EMOJI
Category: Objects
Proposed by: You
Date: January 1, 2025

JUSTIFICATION
----------------------------------------
This emoji fills a critical gap in digital communication.

SELECTION FACTORS
----------------------------------------
Expected daily uses: 50
Existing alternatives: None adequate
Distinctiveness: High
Compatibility: Works at small sizes

STATUS: Awaiting review
Estimated time to your keyboard: 2+ years

Whether your proposal makes it through the committee is another question entirely. But now you know who to blame when your favorite symbol isn't on the keyboard. It's six companies, a weekly subcommittee, and a two-year wait. Welcome to the politics of tiny pictures.