Emoji 18.0 Is Locked: 9 New Emojis Land September 16

Unicode's review window closed today, so the 2026 batch is settled: a cracking face, a pickle, sideways thumbs and six more. Here's the full list — and when your phone will actually show them.

By Shivam Malani ·

The Unicode Consortium closed the public review for Unicode 18.0 today — the quiet little milestone that actually matters, because it means the emoji list for this cycle is settled. Unicode 18.0, and with it Emoji 18.0, is scheduled for release on September 16, 2026.

Nine brand-new emojis made the cut, two of them with the full run of skin tones:

  • Cracking face U+1FAEB — a face fracturing like dropped porcelain. Between this, melting face and last year's distorted face, the smileys section is slowly becoming a body-horror franchise, and honestly, I'm here for it.
  • Leftwards thumb sign and rightwards thumb sign U+1FAF9, U+1FAFA — sideways thumbs, both with skin tones. Give it a week after launch and these will be the default "eh, could go either way" reaction.
  • Monarch butterfly U+1FACC — the first emoji butterfly with an actual species attached. The regular 🦋 has been carrying the entire order of Lepidoptera alone since 2016.
  • Pickle U+1FADD — this one has the best backstory of the batch; more below.
  • Lighthouse U+1F6D9 — long overdue. Ask anyone who has ever tried to text about a coastal trip and had to make do with 🗼.
  • Meteor U+1FA8B — for when ☄️ somehow isn't dramatic enough.
  • Eraser U+1FA8C — school supplies keep quietly filling out; this joins pencils, rulers and paperclips in the stationery drawer.
  • Net with handle U+1FA8D — a bug-catching net, which feels like it should have existed the whole time.

You'll notice I'm not pasting the raw characters here. Until fonts ship later this year they'd just render as empty boxes on your screen, so for now the names and codepoints are the useful part.

About that pickle: its codepoint, U+1FADD, was pencilled in for an apple core during the last cycle, before that emoji got pulled ahead of Emoji 17.0's final release. The slot sat empty for a year and now belongs to a pickle. Somewhere a very smug gherkin lobbyist is taking a victory lap.

One small caveat on names: these come from Unicode's own draft data files, and names occasionally get tweaked between now and the formal release. The set itself, though, is stable — the review window is shut.

When will you actually get them?

Not on September 16. Release day makes the emojis official; it doesn't put them on your keyboard. Going by the last few cycles: Google tends to move first with font updates in the autumn, Samsung has been shipping its batch with the One UI update that arrives around the spring Galaxy launch, and Apple's new emojis have been turning up in an iOS x.4 beta in early March and reaching everyone by the end of that month. Emoji 17.0 followed exactly that arc over the past year.

So the realistic answer: late 2026 if you're on a Pixel, spring 2027 for most everyone else.

What I'm watching next

Unicode's technical committee meets July 28–30 to put the formal stamp on all of this, and proposals for the next batch close July 31 — so the first hints of Emoji 19 should start surfacing toward the end of the year. Also on the calendar: World Emoji Day, July 17. More on that soon.