The Economics of Everyday Things - 99. Emoji

Episode Date: July 14, 2025

We send 10 billion of them every day. Where do they come from? Zachary Crockett hearts this topic. SOURCES:Jennifer 8. Lee, co-founder of Emojination. RESOURCES:"Apple Removes The Gun Emoji, Replaces It With A Squirt Gun," by Carl Franzen (Popular Science, 2021)."Ford’s secret fight for a pickup truck emoji," by Mark Dent (The Hustle, 2019)."The WIRED Guide to Emoji," by Arielle Pardes (WIRED, 2018)."How the iPhone won over Japan and gave the world emoji," by Sam Byford (The Verge, 2017)."About Emoji," (Unicode Consortium). 

Back in 2015, Jennifer Lee was texting with her friend when they noticed something was missing from her iPhones. We were texting about dumplings because that is what we do as Chinese-ish women. And I sent her a picture of dumplings. She sent me back a bunch of emoji. She's like, yum, yum, yum, yum, yum, yum, yum, knife and fork, knife and fork, knife and fork. And then there's like this pause. And she's like, oh, yum, yum, yum, yum, yum, yum, knife and fork, knife and fork, knife and fork. And then there's like this pause and she's like, oh, Apple

doesn't have a dumpling emoji. And I was like, huh, that's really strange because every culture basically has their equivalent of yummy goodness inside a carbohydrate shell. You know, empanadas, perrochi, ravioli, quincalli, palmini. Dumplings are universal. Emoji were also universal. How is there no dumpling emoji? Like, clearly the world is broken. And that discovery raised a question that Lee had never thought about before.

I was like, where do emoji come from? By one estimate, we send around 10 billion emoji every day in text messages, social media posts, dating apps, emails, and workplace chat rooms. That's around 115,000 of them every second. And the craze extends beyond the keyboard. There are emoji plush toys, stickers, books, jewelry, even an emoji movie that grossed more than $200 million at the box office. even an emoji movie that grossed more than $200 million at the box office. Most of us instantly recognize the laughing face, the pile of poop, the eggplant, and the skull.

But it's less known who decides which emoji make it onto our phones, who designs them, and how they're changing the way we communicate. I would argue that emoji are our first natively digital communication form. You have kids who can read and write emoji before they can read and write their native language. They can send something to grandma at like age two. For the Freakonomics Radio Network, this is the economics of everyday things. I'm Zachary Krakett. Today, Emoji. Jennifer Lee is a person who takes her curiosity to an extreme. After she got angry about that missing dumpling, she became obsessed with Emoji. She co-founded Emoji Nation, a collective

that advocates for new designs. She launched an Emoji conference called EmojiCon. And she became involved with the Unicode Consortium, the organization responsible for approving and standardizing emoji. So all emoji all the time. Lee says before emoji, there were emoticons. They basically are facial expressions that are denoted through punctuation. So semicolon parentheses for winking face or like colon capital P for like sticking out the tongue. The first emoticons were used in print back in the 1880s. But it wasn't until the

1980s that a computer scientist at Carnegie Mellon sent the first digital emoticon, a sideways smiley face. When you get into the world of communicating through email and then AOL instant messenger in the 90s, then conversation gets transmitted through text rather than through voice. And then these emoticons were used to sort of give more context to those more casual conversations. In 1999, a team of designers of the Japanese cell carrier NTT DoCoMo took things a step further.

They created a set of 176 12x12 pixel icons, designed to be used on pagers and cell phones. Hearts, moons, cars, planes, and drinks. These new icons were called Emoji, a combination of the Japanese words for picture and character. And then the other characters created their own. But the tricky thing is they weren't interoperable. So if you were a docomo, you could basically only message using those emoji with people who were also docomo. As emoji grew in popularity in Japan, American tech companies decided to get in on the trend. You had Google and Apple bringing their operating systems on their phones into Japan,

and Japanese people felt really strongly that they had to have emoji. You get into this situation where, okay, now instead of being only used on a phone as part of maybe a simple text message, you had to have the emoji move from the keyboard to email. So suddenly, you have this need for them to be interoperable. It was a big problem that each carrier had its own encoding system. When you sent a winky face from an iPhone to your friend's Samsung phone, they'd see an empty box or a square with a question mark inside or even nothing at all.

So technologists turned to the Unicode Consortium. Most of what Unicode did historically was they took languages Arabic or Aramaic or Hebrew or Chinese or Korean or Russian and then they took these writing systems and then just created a standardized encoding system across everything. So one code to rule them all kind of thing. That's why it's called Unicode. In 2007, there were a bunch of engineers that brought a proposal to Unicode to standardize emoji. That proposal was accepted.

And today, Unicode publishes a set of standards for emoji, just as it does for the sets of characters that we use to write English or Japanese or Arabic. The committee is largely controlled by tech companies, Apple, Google, Meta, Microsoft, and Adobe, which each pay a $50,000 annual membership for voting rights. These companies' primary concern is ensuring that text works properly across devices, and that the standards are responsive to their technical needs. But they also have the right to decide which emoji should be included on our devices. Every year, they vote on proposed new emoji.

The ones that are approved are awarded a digital code that's recognized across devices and platforms. So basically, all digital characters have a tiny piece of character real estate. Like imagine you have a city full of addresses, and every character gets its own little tiny address, which is just a sequence of zeros and ones. When you are sending emoji, you're not sending a picture. You're literally sending a little string of zeros and ones. So you pick the poo emoji onto your phone and then you send it to someone and as it goes it's zeros and ones, right? And on the other side, if they have a different device or if they are on a laptop or a tablet,

they are getting those zeros and ones. They're not getting a picture. They're getting zeros and ones. They're looking up those zeros and ones in their emoji phone. And boop! This code makes sure that your friend's Samsung knows that the emoji you sent from your iPhone

was a winky face. But that doesn't mean the winky face she sees looks exactly like the one you sent. Because while Unicode decides which emoji get digital codes, each device maker is responsible for designing its own take on them. One of the most interesting things in these big tech companies is where the emoji group rolls up to.

So in some cases, it rolls up into the mobile? So in some cases it rolls up into the mobile platform division in some places. It rolls up into like little iconography design. In other cases it rolls up into marketing, which is the strangest place for emoji to roll up to. But it really says a lot about an organization and how they think about emoji by like which org it is within the tech company. At Apple, the original set of icons, which debuted in 2008, was largely created by a design intern named Angela Guzman. She spent three months carefully considering everything from the leather stitch on the football to the freckles on the eggplant. Google has its own design team and its own aesthetic.

Although in recent years, its emoji have become more like other companies. These tech companies don't get any revenue from the work they put into emoji. But users like them, and there's an incentive to constantly add new ones. The annual-ish upgrade of emoji forces people to upgrade their operating systems on their phones, which is often how you get security patches through. So emoji often forces waves of security updates through the world. So how does a new emoji make it onto the world's smartphones? And how are these little icons changing the way we communicate?

That's coming up. Most proposals for new emoji come from the voting members of the Unicode Consortium, the big tech companies. But normal people also get to weigh in. The Unico Consortium takes in proposals from the public. We're actually in the middle of emoji proposal season. There's a season? Yes, it's basically beginning of April to the end of July every year,

people can send in their emoji proposals. And then they're considered by the committee, and then through lots of rigorous debate and deliberation, and then a certain subset of them are encoded every year in the Unicode update. Lee is a member of the Emoji Standard and Research Working Group at Unicode, and she says there are a few criteria a new emoji has to meet. Certain things are outright banned. Anything that is trademarked. So no McDonald's arches, no Nike Swish, no that.

No deities and no living people type emoji. Those are like not going to happen. Then there are a series of practical questions. Is it visually distinctive? Is there a sufficient demand for this visual iconography? Is this already used in certain kinds of situations? There was also often a completeness kind of set. This is really important for like the orange heart because there was like red heart, yellow

heart, green heart, blue heart, purple heart, black heart, I think. There was no orange heart and people would use a pumpkin so that was a really big argument for it. Sometimes a second iteration of an emoji is created because the existing one doesn't quite fit the bill. Take for instance the mushroom emoji. The original design which debuted in 2010 is red red and white, which is often poisonous in the wild. An argument was raised that there should be an edible mushroom, and Unicode ended up introducing a brown version in 2023.

If a proposal is seriously considered, Unicode will advance it to a design mock-up stage. They might consult experts in whatever field the emoji is related to. If it's a depiction of a temple, they'll talk with religious leaders and make sure it's accurately portrayed. And in some cases, they'll run into problems with ideas that seem innocent on paper. One that I thought would never see the light of day, because it had this very interesting path, was the mousetrap emoji. PETA, People for the Ethical Treatment of Animals, wrote a letter to the Unicode Consortium complaining about how this was

cruel, these kinds of devices, broke limbs. So the tech companies redesigned the mousetrap emoji to basically cardboard box propped up with a stick and a piece of cheese underneath it. Like literally, who builds a mousetrap like that? I'm like, oh my God, no one's ever gonna use this. And then I was talking to someone, they're like, oh no, no, no, you see it all over Twitter. And then I looked and people use it for thirst traps.

So there are all these selfies of people at the mirror, half-naked, with the mousetrap emoji on it, which is ridiculous for so many reasons. But I was like, every emoji has its day. Who are we to judge? There are now nearly 3,800 Unicode-approved emoji. But in any given year, only a few of the new proposals from the public make it through. There are probably four to five hundred emoji proposals submitted each cycle and maybe like four to eight make it out. I mean it's infinitesimally small.

It can take nearly a year for a new emoji to be approved by Unicode, and then up to another year for all the tech companies to create their own designs and roll them out on their devices. Users sometimes have strong reactions to those designs. Apple did a bagel emoji with no cream cheese, and people were like, what is this? And then they introduced one with cream cheese. Emoji might also get subtle updates based on current events.

The syringe used to be bloody and then we went through COVID and suddenly we were like, no blood in the syringes. The most dramatic one obviously is a gun emoji, which was a gun. And then Apple decided, just kidding, we're gonna make it a green water gun. And then everyone kind of came along,

made it a green water gun. And then Elon bought Twitter and they're like, nope, I'm gonna make it a green water gun. And then everyone kind of came along, made it a green water gun. And then Elon bought Twitter and they're like, nope, I'm gonna make it back into a gun gun. And so Twitter has a gun gun while everyone else now still has a colorful water pistol. Lee says that flag emojis pose a particular challenge. Unicode takes very little responsibility for flags. Basically, they just followed a country code

as recognized by the UN. Unicodeodes trying to stay out of politics basically. Well they shouldn't be deciding like what is a country someone else decides at. Flags make up a large portion of the emoji keyboard. There are more than 250 of them in Apple's library, but they're used a lot less than some other popular emoji. For years, the most widely used emoji was the face with tears of joy. It was even named Word of the Year in 2015 by Oxford Dictionaries. But a recent analysis of social media posts shows that the title might now belong to the loudly crying face.

That shift may be a sign of our times. Because as it turns out, the emoji we use can tell us a lot about public sentiment. Like in the same way that gestures or facial expressions are meant to complement literal words, emoji convey meaning, so you could tell if someone was being sarcastic or playful. In the field of linguistics, emoji are what scholars call paralanguage. They're used to communicate things that can get lost in written text. Sometimes they can change the entire meaning of a message. A text that says, I hate you, reads differently when it's partnered with a laughing face

emoji. But emoji aren't just used to convey emotion. They're designed to be pictograms, literal representations of objects. To the Unicode Consortium, an eggplant is just an eggplant. In practice, though, emoji are often used as ideograms, symbols that represent a concept. A skull means like laughing myself to death, like, oh, that was so funny, I could die. Or there's spill the tea, like, oh, what's the tea?

More than 60% of younger people say they process information faster when it's presented in visual form. Corporate America has tried to latch on to this trend. Even 60% of younger people say they process information faster when it's presented in visual form. Corporate America has tried to latch on to this trend. You can order food from Domino's by texting them a pizza emoji. And many companies now use emoji in email subject lines to boost their open rates. Lee says that brands are also constantly trying to influence the new emoji that Unicode rolls out.

We get a lot of proposals from brands. Some of them are terrible. Some of them are good. Ford had someone do a pickup truck emoji. Timberland helped with the boot emoji. Tinder helped with the interracial couple emoji. You know, white wine emoji. There was a big push from the white wine people because they feel like it's very qualitatively different than red wine. But the emoji that tend to make it through usually start with a genuine desire

to see a beloved object represented. That was the case for Jennifer Lee. After she realized that there was no dumpling emoji back in 2015, she and some friends submitted a proposal. It made its way through Unicode's process and was approved. A year later, it was on her phone. It was just amazing. It was so lifelike.

It was unambiguously a realistic rendition of a boiled dumpling and not, like, oh, some kind of carby thing with creases. How often do you get to say, I've impacted billions of people? I mean, in a tiny, tiny, tiny little way, but still like across billions of people. It's kind of cool. For the economics of everyday things, I'm Zachary Crackett.

This episode was produced by me and Sarah Lilly, and mixed by Jeremy Johnston. We had help from Daniel Moritz-Rapson. Someone sends you red heart, brown heart, yellow heart, you know, like trip, trip, trip, trip, trip, and you're just like, this is ridiculous. Red heart, brown heart, yellow heart, you know, like trip, trip, trip, trip, trip, and you're just like, this is ridiculous. The Freakonomics Radio Network, the hidden side of everything.

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