People & Body Emojis

390 emojis in this category. This is the largest emoji category by a wide margin, and most people never see 90% of it. Behind the handful of person emojis you actually use sits an engineering marvel: over 300 emojis generated through Zero Width Joiner (ZWJ) sequences that combine a base person with a gender sign and a profession object. One emoji like 👩‍🚒 is three Unicode characters stitched together invisibly. The full list of recommended ZWJ sequences tops 1,349 entries across all categories, and the majority are people.

The category's explosion started in May 2016, when four Google employees — Rachel Been, Nicole Bleuel, Agustin Fonts, and Mark Davis — submitted a proposal to the Unicode Consortium arguing that emoji had a gender problem. At the time, women could be brides, dancers, or princesses. Men got all the professions. Google's proposal added 13 profession roles for both genders, from scientist to welder. The New York Times, CNN, and Fortune covered it. By the end of 2016, profession ZWJ sequences shipped on both iOS and Android, and the roster has grown every year since.

Skin tone modifiers landed in Unicode 8.0 in 2015, based on the Fitzpatrick dermatology scale's six categories. A University of Edinburgh study of one billion tweets found that nearly half of modified emojis used light skin tones, but users with darker skin applied modifiers at higher rates. The default yellow remains the most-used option overall. Unicode 14.0 in 2021 added 🫃 Pregnant Man and 🫄 Pregnant Person, which became the most debated emoji release in years. Jennifer Daniel, chair of the Unicode Emoji Subcommittee, pointed out that the existing Pregnant Woman emoji should have been named "person with swollen belly" from the start. The controversy overshadowed the quieter additions like 🫅 Person with Crown, which just works.