Pickles, Lighthouses, and Meteors: New Emoji Coming to iOS 27

We’re now into the season where Apple has delivered most of the big changes for iOS 26, leaving many folks looking ahead to what the company’s next big software update has in store. While there haven’t been any major rumors about what features we can expect, there’s one thing that we can bank on: we’ll be getting some new emoji somewhere along the way.

That’s a given because Apple doesn’t have much of a choice. The Unicode Consortium, the body responsible for ensuring that characters look the same across every electronic device and language, adds new emoji glyphs to the lineup each year. Even leaving aside its status as a full member of the consortium, Apple needs to add support for new designs each year to ensure that iPhone, iPad, and Mac users can see them when reading messages and posts from users on other platforms, such as Android and Windows.

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In fact, emoji provides the best example of why the Unicode Consortium exists in the first place. While we take it for granted that the letter “A” will render the same way on a Mac as it does on a PC, but under the hood it’s all just binary 1’s and 0’s; it’s the Unicode specifications that ensure those align the same letter on every platform. Technically, basic English characters were defined by ASCII a long time ago, but Unicode was created in 1991 to make room for the many other characters used by foreign languages.

Once the alphabet and other more mundane symbols had been standardized, Apple engineers encouraged the Unicode Consortium to extend the standard to include Emoji in 2010, and since then the set of glyphs has been steadily growing with new additions each year.

For example, the consortium’s Emoji Standard & Research Working Group proposed 164 new emoji in Unicode 17 last year, including Bigfoot (officially called “Hairy Creature” to remain culturally inclusive), an apple core, a ballet dancer, an orca, a trombone, a rockslide, a treasure chest, and a “fight cloud,” plus a long list of variations on new and existing emoji to handle skin tone variations and genders, all of which are considered unique emoji.

We’re still waiting for these to materialize, as the spec was only ratified in September, as usual. It also only describes the design of each emoji, leaving it up to the platform developers to provide their own artistic interpretations. Apple’s designers have to create the glyphs that will appear on its devices, which takes time. If past year’s are anything to go by, we’ll probably see last year’s Unicode 17 set appear in iOS 26.4.

The Next Wave of Emoji

Nevertheless, the first Unicode 18 proposal is already out with 19 draft candidates for the next batch. Keith Broni has shared the highlights at Emojipedia to give us an idea of what we can expect.

While 19 is a much smaller number than the 164 that were proposed last year, we’ll still likely only see 9 entirely new glyphs. The other 10 are merely modifier variants to provide five skin tones each for two of the proposed emoji.

Here’s the full list, as shared by Broni:

• A smiley face with squinting eyes
• A leftward thumb sign gesture
• A rightward thumb sign gesture
• A monarch butterfly (as opposed to the non-specifying ?)
• A pickle (as opposed to a ? Cucumber)
• A lighthouse
• A meteor (as opposed to a ?? Comet)
• An eraser, for removing pencil markings from paper
• A net with a handle, like those used to catch bugs
  

For years, the humble Cucumber (?) has had to carry the weight for gardeners and salad enthusiasts, but despite the internet clamouring for a popular Pickle emoji for 15 years, the Unicode Consortium hasn’t budged. Perhaps the “Pickleball lobby” finally forced the issue, but either way, it seems like the Eggplant (?) may have to give up its crown as the most symbolically abused emoji.

While the “Face with Squinting Eyes” is reminiscent of the Confounded Face (?) and Persevering Face (?), it seems intended to represent more of a straining to see or skeptical look.

Unlike the existing emoji included above, the new ones can’t be rendered because they don’t exist yet. Instead, Unicode has provided some sample images to give us an idea of what they’ll look like:

The 10 skin tone variations are for the two thumb sign gestures. Smiley face emojis are typically rendered in only the single yellow tone.

It’s important to note that these emojis are merely Unicode’s concept drawings of what it thinks they’ll look like, and they’re also just proposals. While most usually go on to be included in the final spec, there are sometimes cuts. For example, the apple core emoji proposed in Unicode 17 was removed from the draft list in early 2025 and deferred to the new Emoji 18.0 draft. However, it was subsequently removed from there in October, leaving it in a weird sort of limbo. It could make a comeback, but it’s in the garbage can for now, making it

The Emoji Roadmap for 2026–27

Apple typically puts its own unique spin on many of these. For example, the Emoji 15.1 spec proposed a solid lime in 2023 that Apple rendered as a lime wedge in iOS 17.4. Apple also typically uses its own products wherever possible; the Headphone emoji uses AirPods Max, the Mobile Phone Emoji is clearly an iPhone, and the Laptop, Man Technologist, and Female Technologist emojis clearly show a MacBook, complete with a tiny Apple logo.

Apple also tends to sweat the details when designing these, which is likely why they take a bit longer to appear on Apple devices. Google and Samsung nearly always beat Apple to the punch in supporting the latest emoji, but Apple’s emoji always look far better. This means that the pickles and meteors may show up on Android devices later this year, but you probably won’t see them on your iPhone until iOS 27.4.