The Unicode Consortium, AKA the organisation in charge of creating emojis, has presumably taken to capturing the chaos of 2020, with a heart on fire, a sighing face, and a “flaming dumpster” among the 217 new emojis hitting iOS in 2021, assembled here by Emojipedia.
There’s also a dazzled face with spiral eyes (mood), a rather apt bandaged heart for showing empathy, and a head in the clouds (wake up, sheeple).
A range of LGBT-inclusive and gender-neutral icons are included in the drop, such as a trans flag, a gender-neutral “person with beard”, as well as a “man with beard” and a “woman with beard”. There’s also new icons to represent interracial couples, with both same-sex and mixed-sex couple emojis to be made available in a variety of skin tones.
According to Emojipedia, web apps may start seeing the new icons in the coming months, but coronavirus delays mean that we won’t be able to use them on smartphones until potentially as late as October 2021.
In the meantime, you can see our favourites in the gallery above. Or take a look at these hyper-specific emojis from last year’s drop, from bison and a rock to an anatomical heart and a very tense-looking beetle.