A bacon emoji is among 72 new characters coming to your phone
Great news for bacon lovers: Soon you’ll be able to express yourself via emoji.
The symbol for your favorite cured pork product, along with 71 other characters, is coming out in the next version of Unicode. Other symbols that will be in the version 9.0 release include a soaring eagle, a salad, a shark, clinking champagne glasses, whiskey on the rocks, an egg, a pregnant woman and -- particularly important for Californians -- an avocado.
Emoji encyclopedia Emojipedia announced the changes Thursday along with a mockup of the characters.
The changes were made by the Unicode Consortium, the organization that standardizes how symbols are encoded into text. (You can see what other changes are being made here, though if you aren’t fluent in delta code charts and collation algorithms, it won’t mean much.)
Emojipedia founder Jeremy Burge, who’s also a member of the Unicode Consortium emoji subcommittee, said the images represent a “best guess” of what the new emojis will look like on Apple’s operating system. The names, including “shallow pan of food,” “hand with index and middle fingers crossed,” and “shopping trolley,” are final.
The new version of Unicode is slated for release June 21, though you shouldn’t expect to be adding the new emojis to your Instagram captions that night. As Burge notes in a blog post, June 21 is the date the new version will be released to companies such as Apple, Google and Microsoft. It could take some time for them to incorporate all the changes: Unicode 8.0 was released in June 2015, but the taco emoji wasn’t available to Apple users until October.
After the companies update their software, you’ll have to update your phone software.
In addition to the many food, drink, and animal emojis being added, there are plenty of people. Of the new emojis, six are identifiable as women: a woman embodying the “shruggie,” a woman facepalming, an ostensibly female arm taking a selfie, a gymnast, a pregnant woman, and what appears to be Mrs. Claus.
Meanwhile, new emojis identifiable as men show them playing water polo, disco dancing, wrestling, playing handball, wearing a tux and being a prince.
The lack of diversity among emojis has come up before, particularly the lack of women with careers. A recent New York Times op-ed pondered the lack of professional women emojis; Stephen Colbert skewered the emoji glass ceiling on his show a couple of weeks ago.
In May, Google developers put out a proposal for 13 emojis that showed women in various professions, including a doctor, a farmer and a chef.
Burge said the emoji subcommittee is aware of the gender parity issue. It’s part of what influenced the decision to give every gender-coded emoji a pair, which is where new symbols like the disco dancing man and Santa’s wife came from.
Emoji proposals take some time to go through the committee and then the standardization process; the Unicode Consortium will consider Google’s proposals along with many others for the next Unicode version.
“Everything in (Google’s proposal) looks great, it looks very well done, there’s a wide range,” he said. “I’d love to see more professions (for women) included.”
As for which of the new emojis he expects he’ll be using the most often: “I am a big fan of avocado. I eat it for breakfast.”
Send Jessica Roy your emoji proposal on Twitter @jessica_roy.
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