The UniCode Consortium has announced 117  new emoji for 2020 and have included skin tone and gender variants for the new emojis.  The new emojis have been selected from thousands of proposals by the UniCode Emoji Subcommittee and the proposals must meet certain criteria. 

After Unicode selects the new emojis then companies like Google design the emoji for their operating systems like Android.  According to Jennifer Daniel Google’s Creative Director: Emoji five of the approved designs were proposed by the Android team.  Daniel sad that they are also part of Google’s ongoing effort to create an emoji keyboard that’s more inclusive. 

There are 62 new emoji and 55 new gender and skin tone variants of emoji, including more gender-inclusive options. Some of them look really fun  with the smiling face with a tear, the face with glasses and a mustache, the ninja, and the cockroach. There are new inclusive emoji options in this year’s lineup. There’s a transgender flag emoji on the way (the proposal for which was sponsored by Google and Microsoft), as well as an emoji for the transgender symbol. And Google, which is  introducing more gender-inclusive emoji,  the all-gender options for the “person in veil” emoji (right now, that emoji only portrays a woman) and “person in tuxedo” emoji (which currently only portrays a man). There’s also a new all-gender “person feeding baby with a bottle” emoji, which will give people of all genders a way to communicate that they are feeding a baby.

Proposing emoji isn’t just limited to Google and Microsoft, though — anyone can submit a proposal.

Welcome additions include an emoji showing people hugging  which shows a greater sense of empathy than the previous excited-looking Hugging face , a pinched finger gesture which is commonly referred to simply as "Italian Hand Gesture".

Variations of existing emojis now approved for 2020 include a woman or gender-inclusive person in a tuxedo, as well as a gender-neutral person or a man in a veil (both were changes proposed by Google). These, along with other approved emojis, will be coming to phones later this year.

Also included in this update is a gender-inclusive alternative to Santa Claus . This addition is part of an ongoing effort to make more consistent set of gender options across the board, and expands upon the  138 new gender neutral emojis added in late 2019 as part of Emoji.

Now 2020 will be a year of trolling your friends with the new and funny additional emojis