Emojipedia founder and Chief Emoji Officer Jeremy Burge has announced that the Unicode Consortium has approved 69 emoji as part of the Emoji 5.0 update for 2017.
The Unicode Consortium is a non-profit that develops software internationalization standards and data. Emoji 5.0 includes new smileys, foods, drinks, flags and people.
And the Emoji 5.0 update will include new fantasy characters for the first time like mermaids (and mermen), zombies, elves, genies and vampires.
The Emoji 5.0 update is slated to release in June 2017 and it actually contains 239 emoji in total when gender and skin tone recommendations are included.
After the Unicode Consortium encodes the new emoji, vendors like Apple, Google, Microsoft, Facebook and Twitter decide when to implement the changes. Google and Apple will likely implement the new emoji between October and December 2017.
But the companies may potentially modify the emoji based on their preferences. For example, Apple replaced the gun emoji with a water gun in a previous emoji update. These 69 emoji will be joining approximately 2,000 other emoji that are already available.
Emojipedia released a VIDEO introducing the new emoji.
Read More HERE.
Source - Forbes (written by Amit Chowdhry)