Eight New Emoji Are Coming, and One Is Pure Bigfoot

Your next group chat might include a Bigfoot. The Eight New Emoji approved in the latest Unicode release are finally reaching phones and apps, and the lineup is delightfully strange: a distorted face, a cartoon fight cloud, a hairy creature, an orca, a landslide, a trombone, a treasure chest, and a gender-neutral ballet dancer. After years of waiting, the smallest emoji update in recent memory is going live, and not everyone will see the new characters at the same time.

The release, version seventeen of the emoji standard, was finalized last September and has been rolling out to platforms through this year. Google's Android update carried the set in the spring, Telegram's desktop app added all eight in September, and Apple's iPhone software is still catching up. That staggered rollout has created a familiar headache for anyone who texts across platforms, and it says a lot about how the tiny pictures that carry so much of modern conversation actually get made.

Meet the eight newcomers

The headline act is the distorted face, a warped, bulging-eyed expression built for moments of extreme emotion that no existing face quite captures. It is designed for being overwhelmed, deeply confused, or mentally fried, and emoji watchers expect it to become the go-to reaction for digital distress. Next to it sits the fight cloud, the classic cartoon puff of a scuffle, which offers a playful way to signal an argument without typing a word about it.

The hairy creature is essentially Bigfoot, a shaggy humanoid that the Unicode Consortium unveiled on World Emoji Day alongside the rest of the set. The consortium's blog described the characters as having long-standing symbolic meanings and being visually distinctive, which is about as poetic as standards documents get. The orca fills a long-standing gap in the animal kingdom, giving whale fans something more specific than the generic spouting whale. The treasure chest and the trombone are self-explanatory and instantly useful, while the landslide is the update's oddest pick, a mound of rubble that will presumably find its niche in group chats about bad days.

Rounding out the set is the gender-neutral ballet dancer, a single figure in a classical pose that joins the existing male and female dancers. The addition continues a years-long push to make the emoji keyboard less binary, and it arrived alongside new gender and skin-tone combinations for existing characters like wrestlers and people with bunny ears. All told, the release contains 163 new code points once every variation is counted, even though only eight are brand-new standalone images.

The gap: why your phone might show a blank box

Here is the catch. Unicode only designs the characters; Apple, Google, Samsung, and app makers each draw their own versions on their own schedules. Google shipped the new set months ago, and Telegram renders its own emoji inside the app, so its desktop client picked up all eight in a September update, as reported by the outlet GramNews. But if you are on an iPhone that has not yet received the update carrying them, a friend's excited trombone arrives as an empty rectangle.

This is the so-called emoji gap, and it hits hardest in the months after a release. According to the emoji reference site Emojis Wiki, the new characters are already usable in some Google fonts and on Discord, while standard phone keyboards lag behind. The mismatch is a real communication problem: the sender sees a perfect distorted face, the recipient sees a box with a question mark, and the joke dies in transit. Anyone who has watched a punchline land as tofu knows the feeling.

The history here is instructive. Apple typically folds new emoji into a spring software update, months after the standard is finalized, because its designers redraw every character in the company's house style. That deliberate pace is why iPhone owners waited months for earlier additions like the face with bags under eyes. The pattern also explains a quirk of this release: an early draft candidate called Apple Core was cut before finalization, a reminder that the list stays fluid until the very end of the review process.

The scale of the underlying release puts the eight newcomers in perspective. Version seventeen added 4,803 new characters in total, including four new scripts and thousands of ideographs, bringing the encoded character count to 159,801. Emoji are a sliver of that work, but they are the only part most people will ever touch. For a generation that treats the keyboard as a second language, those eight pictures matter more than the other four thousand characters combined, which is exactly why the rollout drama around them keeps repeating. The quiet-video boom showed how much meaning now travels without words, and emoji are the text-message version of the same shift. The group chat has replaced the comment section as the main stage of online life, and the props on that stage now arrive on different schedules.

What comes next: pickles and meteors

The pipeline is already full. Draft candidates for the next version include a lighthouse, a meteor, a pickle, a monarch butterfly, an eraser, and a cracking face, according to emoji coverage tracking the release. If the full draft survives next year's review, the total emoji count will push toward four thousand. The pickle alone has a vocal fan base, which tells you everything about how seriously people take this process.

There is also a counterpoint worth hearing. Critics argue that eight new emoji a year is too slow for a visual language used by billions of people daily, and the backlog of requested characters is enormous. The consortium's answer is deliberate scarcity: fewer, more distinctive additions rather than a flood of minor variations. Given how fiercely people debate each year's list, the restraint might be the point. Scarcity makes each new arrival an event.

For now, the practical advice is simple. If you want the Eight New Emoji today, check whether your apps and system software are fully updated, and expect some friends to see boxes instead of Bigfoot for a while. The distorted face will be worth the wait. Some feelings simply cannot be typed, and starting this year, one of them finally has a face. Eight New Emoji, one very weird year for your keyboard.