As 2024 winds to a close, it’s hard not to look ahead to the new year and everything it will bring with it. They might not be at the top of the list, but new emojis are being prepared for 2025, and this week, Unicode shared its draft list for eight of the emojis that are being considered for your phone’s keyboard in the coming months.
As spotted by Emojipedia, the Unicode Emoji Standard and Research Working Group proposed 164 emojis to the Unicode Technical Committee (UTC) earlier this month. Of those, the working group provided sample designs for nine of them:
Emojis in the works for 2025. Image source: Emojipedia
Here’s what they all represent, in case you’re drawing a blank looking at any of them:
- Distorted face
- Fight cloud
- Ballet dancer
- Apple core
- Orca (aka killer whale)
- Hairy creature (which looks like Bigfoot)
- Trombone
- Landslide
- Treasure chest
Beyond the new emojis, the proposed list also includes dozens of skin tone variants for existing emojis, such as “People with Bunny Ears” and “People Wrestling.” The new ballet dancer emoji will support all five standard skin tone modifiers as well.
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As Emojipedia explains, the 164 proposed emojis are all draft candidates for Emoji 17.0. These are always subject to change, which means there might be additions (or subtractions) before the new version is approved. That is expected to happen in September 2025.
Of course, approval doesn’t mean the fresh emojis will immediately show up on your iPhone or Android device. For instance, Emoji 16.0 was approved in September of this year, but we’ve still yet to see any of the new emojis on our built-in emoji keyboards.
In the meantime, iPhone owners can use Genmoji to create their own AI emojis.
