The shadowy (but not really) Unicode Consortium has approved 72 new emoji after a flood of public input which will be included in the Unicode 9.0 release, arriving in June 2016. The new batch includes new smiley faces like Cowboy, Drooling Face, and Rolling on the Floor Laughing, as well as some other additions that are sure to come in handy like a scary clown face, a hand taking a selfie, fingers crossed, and a tumbler of whiskey not to mention two new food items that are clearly going to enable us to indicate "penis" now with three different sizes to choose from, with cucumber and baguette joining the now overused eggplant.
Below, a few more, and I'm pretty sure that Almost-Vomiting Face is going to become incredibly popular for obvious reasons.
You can see the entire list here, and note that we will all have to wait for the next release for things like Dumpling, Fortune Cookie, and Face With One Eyebrow Raised.
The Unicode Consortium is just "a little known tribunal of engineers in Mountain View," most of them at places like Apple and Google, as ABC 7 explains, just 11 of them in fact, who all pay $18,000 a year to become voting members. They are open to any and all public suggestions, however, and as the consortium's president Mark Davis insists to the station, "A lot of people are surprised that anyone can propose an emoji. [But] Anyone can propose an emoji."
Bay Area residents Jennifer Lee and her friend designer Yiying Lu were behind the proposed dumpling, fortune cookie, and Chinese takeout box emoji that will be coming next year, saying that they were surprised that Chinese food was under-represented in the existing visual language.
As we learned this month, there's a campaign started at Google pressing for emoji of women in the workforce given that the only female emoji are either mothers, dancing girls, or they're doing their nails but those are not part of this release. But given the Google connection at Unicode, we're likely to see more depictions of working woman in an upcoming release, and hopefully, maybe, we can start cutting some of the dumb ones no one uses like the office supplies and that nondescript beige purse.
And for all you philistines out there who don't think emoji are important, I point you to the fact that Oxford Dictionaries selected one as their "Word of the Year" for 2015 it was, naturally, Face with Tears of Joy or Laughing Through Tears, depending on your preference.
Previously: Google Presses Unicode For 'Working Women' Emoji
How did we get by without Staying Alive Man and Face-Palm? Unicode via Emojipedia