Revealed: the 9 new emoji coming to your smartphone in 2025, including a bulging smiley face and Bigfoot
Whether it’s a friendly smiley or a cheeky eggplant, emoji are now a regular part of many of our daily conversations.
Now the draft emoji list for 2025/2026 has been revealed – and it suggests emoji lovers could soon have several new characters to play with.
Unicode has presented a total of 164 new emoji, including nine brand new characters.
Users can use a ‘distorted face’, with large, insect-like eyes, red cheeks and raised eyebrows.
You also get access to a ‘furry creature’, which seems to be inspired by Bigfoot.
Although the new emoji have yet to be approved, they have already generated great interest on X (formerly Twitter).
“Big foot would be awesome,” one user wrote, while another added, “I need that bigfoot.”
And someone joked: ‘oh the distorted face is going to be my most used emoji for sho.’
Unicode has presented a total of 164 new emoji, including nine brand new characters
In addition to the names of the new emoji, the Emoji Subcommittee provided examples of what they will look like.
The ‘distorted face’ has large, bulging eyes, raised eyebrows and red cheeks, while the ‘fighting cloud’ shows stars and swirls bursting from a cloud.
The ‘ballet dancer’ shows a dancer performing an arabesque, while the ‘furry creature’ looks exactly like Bigfoot.
The other characters include an apple core, a killer whale (killer whale), a trombone, a landslide and a treasure chest.
However, it may still be a while before we finally get them on our smartphones.
In a blog announcing the new characters, Emojipedia explained: ‘Unicode 17.0 and Emoji 17.0 are expected to be approved in September 2025, so we will have to wait a while before they are officially recommended.
‘Between now and September 2025, a number of further considerations will be made by Unicode regarding these draft emoji candidates.
“This means that some of these proposed emojis may not be submitted for final approval.”
Although the new emoji have yet to be approved, they have already generated great interest on X (formerly Twitter)
Despite the wait, several users took to X to discuss their excitement for the new characters.
“I love the ballet dancer,” said one user, while another added, “I appreciate big feet.”
One user wrote: ‘The distorted face and apple core are dope.’
And another joked: ‘I live on the west coast so we need orcas.
“Also, the love distorted face could be useful in response to some of the political views on this app.”
DO EMOJIS RENEW THE ENGLISH LANGUAGE?
Emojis may be a fun form of communication, but they are destroying the English language, according to a recent Google study.
Smiley faces, love hearts, thumbs up and other cartoon icons – instead of words – are the preferred communication method of teenagers, who are considered the worst offenders when it comes to the decline in grammar and punctuation.
More than a third of British adults believe emojis are the reason for the deterioration of correct language use, according to the research commissioned by the Google-owned YouTube site.
Emojis were first used by Japanese mobile phone companies in the late 1990s to express an emotion, concept or message in a simple, graphic way. Now Twitter feeds, text messages, and Facebook posts are full of them
Of the 2,000 adults aged 16 to 65 who were asked for their views, 94 per cent believed English was in decline, with 80 per cent naming young people as the worst offenders.
The most common mistakes British people make are spelling mistakes (21 percent), followed closely by the placement of apostrophes (16 percent) and the misuse of a comma (16 percent).
More than half of British adults are not confident in their command of spelling and grammar, the survey also found.
Additionally, about three-quarters of adults rely on emoji to communicate, in addition to a reliance on predictive text and spell check.
The use of emojis has become so deeply ingrained in our culture that the Oxford Dictionary’s ‘Word of the Year’ in 2015 wasn’t actually a word at all – it was the Face With Tears emoji, which shows just how influential the little graphic image is . images have become.
They were first used by Japanese mobile phone companies in the late 1990s to express an emotion, concept or message in a simple, graphic way.