(SPOT.ph)Â Whether you're feeling like shit or laughing out loud, there's always an emoji to match your emotion. These yellow-faced pictograms are now more important than ever, especially in this time when face-to-face conversations are limited to messaging services. And to make sure that there's a character for every mood, the Unicode Consortium released 37 new emojis that will be gradually rolled out to devices from the end of the year and throughout 2022.
Also read: The World's Favorite Emoji for 2021 Is Pretty Accurate
Unicode 14.0, which was aptly released on September 14, includes the Face with Open Eyes, which can be used to imply shock or surprise; Face with Peeking Eye for expressing disgust or fear; Dotted Line Face, which is an established comic-book trope for feelings of smallness or isolation; Face Holding Back Tears; and Saluting Face. There are also hand gestures, which come in various skin colors, to represent a pointing finger, heart hands, a handshake, and the K-Pop-inspired finger hearts.Â
But most relatable of all especially in this pandemic is the Melting Face, a yellow smiley face melting into a puddle. Its eyes and mouth slip down the face, yet still maintain a distorted smile. According to emojipedia.org, it can be used to talk about extreme heat—a common issue amid the climate crisis; or to convey feelings of "embarrassment, shame, or a slowly sinking sense of dread."
Unicode Consortium usually releases a new set of characters around March of every year, which prompts operation systems to adopt the update from August to December. But in April 2020, they decided to postpone the release of version 14.0 by six months and moved the target date from March to September this year. "Under the current circumstances we’ve heard that our contributors have a lot on their plates at the moment and decided it was in the best interests of our volunteers and the organizations that depend on the standard to push out our release date," said Mark Davis, President of the Consortium, said in a statement.
Unicode Consortium is a non-profit organization formed in 1991 in California. They maintain and publish the Unicorn Standard, which contains unifying characters for modern and historic scripts, letters of various alphabets, punctuations, symbols, and emojis. They basically make sure that all of the world's languages, including dead ones, can be translated through your keyboard and into your monitors or phone screens. Yes, that includes our feelings, too.
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