* Emojipedia Blog Post
Draft Emoji List for 2026/2027
https://blog.emojipedia.org/draft-emoji-list-for-2026-2027/
# Some content has been translated from Gemini 3.0 Flash and slightly modified.
As a new year begins, let's take a look at the list of candidate emojis that are expected to be added to the standard emoji keyboard around late 2026.
The additions include a thinly smiling face with raised eyebrows, two new thumbs-up gestures, pickles, and lighthouses. The latest update from the Unicode Emoji Standards and Research Group, quietly uploaded to the Unicode Consortium's public document archive last year, proposes nine new emoji themes to be released as part of Emoji 18.0 in September 2026, along with ten additional skin tone variations for two of those themes.
The new additions mentioned above are as follows:
- Thinly smiling face with raised eyebrows
- Thumbs-up gesture pointing left
- Thumbs-up gesture pointing right
- Monarch butterfly (species unspecified 🦋 Butterfly distinguished)
- Pickle (🥒 Cucumber distinguished)
- Lighthouse
- Meteor (☄️ Comet distinguished)
- Eraser (for erasing pencil marks on paper)
- Net with handle (for insect collecting, etc.)
The image above is based on the Google Noto Color Emoji style and was created using images from Noto Color Emoji team members' work or new emoji concept proposals.
Are these all the new emojis? When will they be available?
The 19 proposed emojis are currently all 'draft' candidates for 'Emoji 18.0'. Unicode 18.0 and Emoji 18.0 are still in draft stage, so there is a possibility of changes.
Between now and September 2026, Unicode will conduct several additional reviews of these emoji candidates, and some proposals may not make it to the final approval stage.
For example, the 'Apple Core' emoji proposed at the end of 2024 was initially included in the draft list but ultimately was not included in Emoji 17.0. It was removed from the list in early 2025 and postponed to the Emoji 18.0 draft at that time.
However, since then, there has been a recommendation to remove this proposal from the Emoji 18.0 candidate list as well, so its process for being added to the emoji keyboard is currently completely halted.
▼ Image: New emojis for Unicode 17.0 shown in the Unicode draft document. You can see that the 'Apple Core' emoji, which has since been removed, was included in the list.
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