The Current - Got an idea for a new emoji? What it takes to make the cut

Episode Date: April 23, 2026

Unicode is taking pitches for emojis. Graphic designer Jennifer Daniel helps decide which ones make it. She says a successful emoji should have multiple meanings. Sorry aerial tramway ;)

Our My Beauty Destination event is on at Jean Couttsou. It's the perfect opportunity to discover what's new, earn mo' points, and take advantage of savings to spring into the new season. Because from this Friday to Sunday only, you'll get a $15 Jean-Cutu gift card for every $75 you spend on cosmetics. Plus, until Wednesday, get 20% off selected Carine Jean-Cha anti-aging skincare products. Head in store or online to take advantage of these offers. Certain conditions apply. Details at jeancoutu.com.

This is a CBC podcast. Hello, I'm Matt Galloway, and this is the current podcast. Here's the scenario. You're typing a message. You search for an emoji to perfectly express what it is that you're thinking, and it's not there. There are thousands of emojis, but the one that you need just doesn't exist. So you think they should make that emoji. Well, you know what?

You could make that emoji, or at the very least you could try to make that emoji, because Unicode, the group that decides what emojis to add to our keyboards, is now taking proposals for 2026. But remember, it is 2026. There are already almost 4,000 emojis out there, and a lot of them don't get used, perhaps for very good reason. Saturday Night Live recently had some fun with that idea with a sketch where the most used red heart emoji trash talks,

the rarely used aerial tramway. I'm number one because I'm useful. People use me for everything. I miss you, heart. Here's a pick of my dog, hard. Here's a pick of my bare ass. Hard, hard, hard, hard, hard. Aerial tramway is only used

when talking about that specific cable-based transportation. Cap, cap, cap. No, it's not cap. Cap. No, it's not. Cap. When would someone use you? Okay.

Hey, I'm going to take the aerial tramway. Hey, I'm on the aerial tramway. Okay, what other uses that aren't about physically riding it? Yo, man, girl got me acting like an aerial train. Jennifer Daniel is a graphic designer, the chair of the Unicode subcommittee that decides which new emojis make it to your keyboard. She's in San Francisco. Jennifer, good morning. Good morning.

Do you feel bad for Ariel Tramway getting the stick there on SNL? Justice for Ariel Tramway. This skit makes me laugh. I have tears in my eyes right now. Everyone who's proposing an emoji should watch it, internalize it, and ask themselves if they're making a proposal for Ariel Tramway or for Red Heart. If you make the Ariel Tramway, you're not going to make it. Probably not. It's great if you live near a mountain, but, you know, we don't all have that luxury. You are the chair of, this is my ignorance showing. I had no idea there was some sort of committee, a board that gets together to decide which emojis exist and which emoji.

will not make it? You know, a lot of people think they just get made. Just out of the world that nothing is required to make it happen. But yeah, behind the scenes, behind those hearts and broken hearts, there are people, volunteers for a non-for-profit who help with new emoji additions every year. Can you walk us through how this works, how a proposal goes from an idea to being the thing that's on my phone? emoji go through so many different types of journeys. But by the time an emoji proposal comes to our space, someone has done a great deal of research. They've documented it. There's a whole criteria. It's like writing a dissertation. It goes through a review process. It goes through modifications and edits. And then if it makes its way through, it gets added to the technical standard. And later it ends up on your keyboard. I was looking at doing their emoji submissions that you have. And one of them is for iBags emoji, which is like a fake. with like giant dark circles, I guess, and bags under your eyes or something.

And all the research that's here, there's information about who this might be targeted to, which is parents of new children or heavy consumers of alcohol or shift workers. There is information as to how many times people might search for an emoji like this to wonder whether it exists. There's a lot of research that goes into figuring out whether somebody would actually use such an emoji, right? That's right. We're always looking at frequency of use. is it visually distinctive? Does it have symbolic?

Can it be used beyond literally representing itself? We want to make sure that it's not just going to collect cobwebs and clutter your phone. You said it you're looking for in some ways the Swiss Army knife, not the single-use plastic knife. What is the distinction between the two when it comes to the kind of things that people might pitch for an emoji? Well, yeah, you want something that can represent multiple concepts. So I think a really good example of a proposal that does that is, are you feeling, familiar with this gesture when you pinch your index finger and thumb together. No, I know, you've never seen this gesture. You need to watch more K-pop.

Clearly. This means something very specific to some folks who are familiar with K-pop, which means finger heart. So the little tips of your thumb and your index finger, when pressed together, it gives the appearance of a heart. But absent of that knowledge, when you look at this hand gesture, what does it make you think? I mean, it can be a number of things. It can be like you're clicking your fingers together. There's all sorts of things that you could see in that.

Exactly. So this emoji can be used, yes, for finger heart, but also for snap or for money because it looks like you're rubbing it together. Or even when I'm texting my brother, the world's smallest violin, I pair it next to a violin. It can be used for lots of different concepts. It's not just one thing to one person. You created an emoji called Falling Debris? Yes, that is a new one. That just landed this year.

Kind of looks like an avalanche. Yes, yes. We want to make sure it can represent all kinds of falling debris. How is that a Swiss Army knife and not just an aerial tramway? Do you know what I mean? How are we not just talking about an avalanche when we're actually talking about using the falling debris emoji? Have you never felt like the entire world is collapsing upon you? I feel like falling debris is this metaphor for how we feel about not just literally a natural disaster, of course, but also for,

an emotional experience, much like bags under eyes is a feeling. It is also how you physically look. There are symbols around us that represent not just on the outside, but also on the inside. So tell me about an emoji that might have multiple uses. People think that it means one thing, maybe that they use it in a different way, or it can mean a lot of different things to a lot of different people. Have you ever used the melting face emoji before? I don't think so. You haven't? Oh, you really.

So I have a shallow emoji pool, apparently. We got to diversify what you're pulling from. I'm melting face is such a great one, right? It's just your classic face melting into a puddle. And what I love about that is that because it's smiling, it's happy, but clearly something's going on, like happy but sad. It can be very literal. Like, it's so hot. It's so, so very hot at summertime.

So you're literally melting into a puddle. It also is in this semi-liquid. semi-solid state. So it's like you're disappearing. Like, I'd rather not be here right now, melting into a puddle. It can express regret. Like, I wish I hadn't just said that, melty face emoji. So it contains multitudes. Which is easier to say in an emoji than in a big, long paragraph of things to try to explain what you're trying to get across. Words just fall short sometimes, and the image just allows there to be room for interpretation. I said there's more than 4,000 emojis that exist, is that right?

That's right. But you say in the substack that you write that it's just a handful of them that people actually use. Tears of joy and heart alone represent 15% roughly of all emoji use. Five emoji represent 25% of all emojis, and yet we have 4,000 of them. A lot of them are the face emojis, right? People love, I mean, whether it's the tears of joy or the grip. I mean, I use the grimmis one all the time, I think. It's kind of like, you know, that's just, you can use it for anything. What is it about face emojis that people love? Well, faces, hand gestures, and some of them are emotive contextual ones like hearts and sparkles. Those those dominate the headspace for sure.

And I think what we're looking for is to overcome this digital divide, right? If I say it was great to see you, that's a lovely text. to receive, but you don't feel the same warmth. You don't hear it in my voice. You don't see the eye contact. You don't see my hand gesture. You don't feel it, basically. And so to overcome the plainness of that text, those expressions clarify your intent. Tell me more about this, why you think we need emojis.

We can communicate in any number of ways. I can talk to you. I can text to you. I can leave a voice message. But why do I need a symbol? Emote are digital paralinguistics, right? They allow us to say, I'm joking. or I'm soft without having to write a whole paragraph to explain what your intent is.

They don't replace words. They really give our words their intention back. Just like when we're talking, you know, we don't just say words. We express them. How do you think it's changed the way that we communicate? I think with every generation that has used emoji becomes more comfortable with it. Like when emoji first came out, everyone was saying, it's going to ruin language, right? It was just like, what do we need these for? We haven't had them

at all. What are these going to do? It's going to ruin it. By the time I came around, I think that rhetoric had kind of got a little bit more quiet, but it was still very literal, right? People were like, okay, like, I've had them on my phone for a while now. And we would be like, I'm happy, happy face. I'm sad, sad face. The next generation was like, well, that, we can do better than that. They started using it more metaphorically. The more comfortable you are with it, the more you can experiment, the more you can play with it. And we see that now. Folks are, you know, rather than using a broken heart emoji, they're using the wilted rose. It's not that broken heart doesn't mean the same thing or isn't valid or isn't relevant. It's that there's a way to play

with how you feel that isn't the same way you did yesterday. And that's that playfulness and that expression and the fact that language moves so fast online, the fact that emoji, you know, she can keep up with it is really exciting. Like I love hearing how people use emoji. Now, in addition to being somebody who helps determine which emojis exist, you also have this online tool, the emoji kitchen, where people can create their own emojis, right? So you can mash some of the stuff together.

You have like a storm emoji and then the poop emoji, and you make the poop storm. People might have a stronger way of describing that, and perhaps that speaks to these times that we're in right now. you can have the hot dog emoji and a flower bouquet emoji and you have a hot dog bouquet emoji, which I'm not sure why somebody would want, but maybe that's what they want. I guess that's a gift to somebody. Your dog, you know, what kind of a bouquet do you give your dog, obviously, a bouquet of hot dogs?

It's funny that you mentioned emoji kitchen. I love it. It's where I go to play. It's like a sketchbook. You know, Unicode is very, it's like a living archive. It's permanent. Once an emoji is added to the Unicode standard, it's never removed. And so that's why they're such a high benchmark for new emoji additions.

But in emoji kitchen, it's not technically legal emoji. They're just drawings that can be shared like any other picture on the internet. And it's a mad scientist experiment. It's where I go to challenge some of the conventions with Unicode. I think it's really important, especially when you're working with a large group to say, like, okay, this is how we measure success? But is that always going to be true? Is that still true? And with the Moji Kitchen, I can go, okay, like, Unicom.

code says, you know, no mayor unicorns, right? In emoji kitchen, you'll have a mare unicorn, you'll have a mare cat, you'll have a mare dog, you'll have all kinds of versions of it, and it allows us to mash words together, turn nouns into verbs, make all the emoji black so they can be goth. I think of drawing as thinking, and so when I see these pictures, it helps me think more about what I mean and what I'm trying to say. Do you see the way that language changes? Do you see that reflected in how people create and use emojis? Yeah.

The way people use emoji changing, it's interesting. I actually think you see it less in what people are proposing and more about how they're using the current set. So I have a friend who, when she's having a nervous breakdown, she sends me a cartwheel emoji and a black hole. So it looks like they're corporating into the black hole. Like, that'll never be an emoji. That should never be an emoji.

It is our now secret little language of what we text each other when we need the other person to pick up the phone. And I love that. I love seeing how people are using emoji to say new inventive things for them to be, in many ways, coded and exploratory. You know, SNL will give Ariel Tramway a hard time. But, like, you know, I absolutely would challenge everyone to try to use an emoji. that they haven't used before. You know, maybe Ariel Tramway is our new gateway to adventure or elevating your perspective on life. Like, like, these are very big reaches, obviously.

But I don't think we have to be limited by what it means today, because it can mean something entirely new tomorrow. Which suggests that the library will continue to grow and grow and grow, that there's no hard cap on how many emoji will be created. Not right now. What is the one that you use the most? Oh, use the most? Hard to say.

Pretty diverse emoji user. I will say, I think I'm probably someone who mixes it up a lot. I've been using water fountain a lot. I love it. It's pretty. It's just like this very aesthetic looking symbol. It can mean lots of things are happening or it's very peaceful and blissful or just a signature in the acknowledgement of a message much better than a thumbs up for me.

but I mix it up depending on who I'm talking to. I do try to use new emoji all the time to get a sense of how they feel, what they mean, how people react to them. What emoji do you use these days? It's the grimace usually. That's the one, just and it's the state of the world, right?

Everything is kind of like, ugh. A lot of tension there is right now. A lot of teeth and people kind of grinding them. That's where we're how it feels like right now. Yeah, I feel that for sure. Jennifer, this is really interesting. Part of it is a look inside.

something that so many of us use every day and how they ended up on our phone, but also how people can go about submitting their own. Thank you very much for this. Oh, yeah, absolutely. Jennifer Daniel is the chair of Unicode emoji subcommittee. It's taking proposals for new emojis or emoji, depending on what you want to say. From now, until the end of July, she was in San Francisco. This has been the current podcast. You can hear our show Monday to Friday on CBC Radio 1 at 8.30 a.m. at all times. time zones. You can also listen online at cbc.ca.ca.ca slash the current or on the CBC Listen app or wherever you get your podcasts. My name is Matt Galloway. Thanks for listening. For more CBC podcasts, go to

cbc.ca.ca slash podcasts.