They made a bean emoji and it’s coming to iOS

It's an exciting time for magical fruit. The Unicode Consortium, the institution behind the sacred Emoji Subcommittee, finalized the Emoji 14.0 update in September, introducing 37 brand new emoji — including one for beans. According to MacRumors, Apple has now adopted the new tiny pictures with the iOS 15.4 beta. Cool beans!

Now that Emoji 14.0 is upon us, you should get ready for very cute bubbles, a mirror disco ball, and a saluting face that’s silly enough to diffuse any passive aggression that builds up when your housemate nags you about chores. There’s also a pregnant man emoji — a three-byte pictograph apparently so inflammatory that people in the Fox News comment section are saying they’re boycotting Apple.

I’m bracing myself for violent overuse of the face holding back tears and the melting face, which encompasses a precise (if ineffable) emotion. Sometimes all you can do is smile as your soul melts into oblivion. I’m also preparing myself for this deeply uncomfortable but inevitable combination:

Wait, that didn’t exist until now? — It might have taken a while, but finally, in the Year of Our Lord 2022, we are getting multi-racial handshake emoji. Another one that seems overdue is the equals sign.

The emoji repository, which currently numbers 3633 characters, evolves with time. So do the subtle innuendos of those cartoon blips. As New York Magazine puts it, the “seemingly infantile cartoons are instantly recognizable, which makes them understandable even across linguistic barriers. Yet the implications of emoji — their secret meanings — are constantly in flux."

Submit your own! — You are welcome to submit our own formal emoji proposals if you’d like to add to our shared visual language. A small council of people you’ve probably never heard of meticulously monitors emoji rollout, and while there are strict guidelines, some of the ones that make the cut are surprisingly goofy. Consider the troll emoji that the experts deemed necessary after two people wrote a ten-page proposal for its inclusion.