217 new emojis unveiled for 2021

New emojis for the year 2021 have been unveiled reflecting much of the chaos gripping the current year. Unicode Consortium, the non-profit organisation at the helm of creating emojis, announced their new set of avatars for their limited Emoji13.1 release. The consortium announced that that there will be no more new releases of emojis until 2022 due to the pandemic.

The new library of avatars was made purposely to convey the pains brought on by the challenges of 2020 which includes a heart with a bandage wrapped around it as well as a heart on fire. Also in its line up of new additions is a face in the clouds and a face exhaling. Some of the emojis have been made to be ambiguous and can carry different ways of being interpreted.

One of these is the face in the clouds emoji which may represent fogginess, confusion but it could also mean a sense of calm and bliss.

The bulk of the limited release consists mostly of updates dedicated to skin tones. Out of the 217 additions, 200 emojis were created to include more skin tone choices as the current options only have yellow skin tone. These were focused on couple emojis and kissing emojis meant to depict interracial relationships, CNN reports.

Another major focal point for the new additions is to reflect gender-neutrality where designs feature three variants of a bearded person. The avatars consist of a gender-neutral or non-binary "person" with a beard, a man with a beard and a bearded woman.

In a statement from Emojipedia, the group said :

"The Unicode Consortium is a volunteer organisation and we would be completely without new emoji in 2021 if it weren't for the dedication of many volunteers who make this possible."

The Unicode committee convenes annually to ensure there are continuous improvements on representation with its participants presenting cases as to why a particular emoji should be updated or added.

Expect the new updates to hit mobile phones and gadgets between January to October 2021 with the new and complete Emoji 14 release set for launch in 2022.