You Can Propose a New Emoji Until July 31 — Here's How

Unicode's public emoji proposal window is open right now, and it closes at the end of the day on July 31, 2026. That's not a metaphor — the same form that got the pickle and the saluting face onto your keyboard is sitting there waiting for the next batch, and there's no velvet rope. No committee membership, no credentials, no invitation. Write a proposal document, back it with real evidence, submit it.

That's the fun part. The less fun part is that almost nobody gets a yes, and the reasons are specific once you read Unicode's own guidelines instead of guessing.

What actually makes a proposal work

The Emoji Standard & Research Working Group weighs proposals against a set list of factors, and none of them is "a lot of people asked for it":

• Distinctiveness — is it recognizable at 18×18 pixels, the size it'll actually render at, not the size of your nice mockup?
• Breaks new ground — does it represent something genuinely new, or is it a variant of something that already exists? A vacuum cleaner doesn't clear this bar when 🧹 broom already covers "cleaning."
• Usage level — this is the one that trips people up. They want screenshots of Google Search, Google Video Search, Google Trends and Google Books Ngram data, run against a comparison term (their own instructions literally use "elephant"). Petitions, hashtags and Change.org campaigns are explicitly worthless here — the guidelines call out the taco emoji by name to make the point: the commercial petitions for 🌮 played no part in its approval, the search data did.
• Completeness — does it close out an obviously incomplete set, the way finishing the zodiac did?
• Multiple meanings and use in sequences — can it carry metaphor, or combine with other emoji to say something new?

Notice what's missing: nowhere does it say "is this a nice idea." It's closer to a grant application than a suggestion box.

What gets tossed before anyone reads your pitch

Some categories are automatically declined, full stop, no matter how strong the rest of the proposal is: logos and brands, UI icons, specific people (real or fictional), specific buildings and landmarks, deities, flags without an official ISO country code, anything with text baked into the image, requests for one exact image rather than a general concept, and proposals that are just a directional flip of something that already exists. Rule those out before you spend a weekend on search screenshots.

Proposal to your phone: the realistic timeline

Say your proposal clears everything above. It still isn't landing on your phone soon. Unicode says every submitter hears back by November 30, 2026, and a yes at that point just means your concept enters the queue for a future version — this year's set, Emoji 18.0, is already locked and shipping September 16. From there it needs full committee sign-off, then every vendor — Apple, Google, Samsung and the rest — designs and ships its own artwork on its own schedule. I wrote up how that committee process works in who approves new emojis; the short version is proposal to something you can actually type usually runs a couple of years, not a couple of months.

Should you actually bother?

Only if you have a real case. The bar isn't creativity, it's evidence — most people who try this skip straight to a cute picture with no search data behind it, which is exactly the kind of submission that gets filed and forgotten. But the form is free, the rules are public, and the deadline is real. If you've genuinely noticed a gap — something you reach for constantly and can't find — you have three weeks to make the case with numbers instead of vibes. Worse ideas than yours have made it in.