July 17th is World Emoji Day, the day dedicated to the 'smileys' that allow us to express many moods via chat and social networks. The initiative was born in 2014 from the idea of Jeremy Burge, an emoticon historian and founder of Emojipedia, a website that collects and catalogs all emojis. In this period of pandemic and lockdown, several themed emoticons have been added, such as that of Twitter which raised awareness on hand washing and that of Facebook which depicted a hug.
However, the epidemic has also had an impact on this sector: the new emojis already planned, and arriving next autumn, will not undergo any changes, while the emoticons scheduled for 2021 will not be present: they will slip to 2022. To report this in the past weeks it was the Unicode consortium, which takes care of their standardization and is based on the work of volunteers, which underwent changes during the pandemic.
This year, however, new emojis related to version 13 of the standard will arrive in the hands of users. These are 117 pictograms already known, including the hand with the fingertips joined in the gesture "what do you want?", Breastfeeding with bottles, the transgender flag and a roundup of new objects, food and animals.