Apple previews new emoji coming in iOS 12

After all of the news from yesterday, and indeed the past week, I think we all deserve an escape from reality.  Fortunately, Apple has some nice pictures for us to look at.  To celebrate World Emoji Day today, Apple is previewing some of the new emoji characters which will be a part of iOS 12 this Fall.  The ideas for new emoji are considered and approved by the Unicode Consortium, and the new emoji in iOS 12 come from the Consortium’s Emoji Version 11.0, approved earlier this year.  The Consortium has general rules on what each emoji is supposed to look like, but each company has a lot of flexibility in the specific designs, which is why emoji can look different on iPhone, Android, your computer, etc.  As always, the designers at Apple have done a really nice job with these.

First, we have a male and female superhero, the infinity symbol, and a Nazar Amulet (which Emojipedia explains is an “eye-shaped amulet believed to protect against the ‘evil eye'” and which is common in Turkey:

Next we have a parrot, lobster, kangaroo, and peacock, which are some of the new animals in iOS 12 (along with a racoon, llamo, hippotamus, badger, swan, and mosquito):

iOS 12 will include many more food items.  Here are leafy green, mango, moon cake (a Chinese pastry), and cupcake.  Other new food items will include a bagel and salt.

There are new faces in iOS 12.  Here are partying face, pleading face, cold face, and smiling face with three hearts.  The other new faces are hot face and woozy face.

The new emoji also contain more hair options for both sexes:  red hair, curly hair, bald, and white hair, each of which is presented in a generic format plus five different skin tones.  For example, here are larger versions of the six different versions of the new female with red hair:

Here are all of the new hairstyles and colors:

Of course, if you have a new iPhone such as an iPhone X, you will also be able to use Apple’s new Memoji feature to create an emoji that looks like yourself.  To show this off, Apple has changed the page of the Apple website that shows the faces of Apple’s executives, and today instead of photographs it includes Memoji.  Look at the page for all of the new faces, but here are some of them:

There are also new objects in iOS 12.  Here are yarn, softball, and test tube.  Other new objects include compass, brick, skateboard, luggage, firecracker, red gift envelope, flying disc, lacrosse, jigsaw, teddy bear, chess pawn, abacus, receipt, toolbox, magnet, petri dish, DNA, fire extinguisher, lotion bottle, thread, safety pin, broom, basket, roll of toilet paper, soap, sponge and pirate flag.

In all, Apple says that there are over 70 new emoji characters.  However, according to Emojipedia, the actual number is closer to 150 when gender and skin tone are taken into account.