🎂The 10th World Emoji Day: A Look Back At Emoji's Fifteen Years Of Evolution

We're celebrating the World Emoji Day again for 2023!🎉

This is the 10th World Emoji Day since Emojipedia founder Jeremy Burge decided to establish the date as a festival to commemorate the exsistence of emojis on July 17, 2014.

With a fifteen-year trajectory of evolution, emojis have gone from the initially indistinct pixel images to thousands of standardized characters. Nowadays, emojis have indubitably secured an irreplaceable position in our everyday lives.

On this special day, I want to take a look back with you all emoji lovers at the evolution and transformation of emojis, discerning how they have fundamentally altered our lives, and how they'll continue to advance and infuse our lives with greater joy and amusement!

Emojis were initially created by the Japanese in the late 1990s. At that time, they exhibited a relatively singular array and were limited in number, encompassing only some fundamental expressions and objects.

🔺：First emojis created in 1999

Subsequently, with the proliferation of emojis, they were officially integrated into the Unicode coding system in 2010 and begun to be managed by Unicode. Over the next few years, Unicode successively introduced hundreds of new emojis, particularly focused on categories of expressions and objects, thus gradually enriching the category of emojis.

In 2015, a significant innovation was introduced with the release of Unicode 8.0: the skin-tone modifier, permitting users to select different skin tones for human-related emojis.

This can be seen as a milestone in the development of emoji diversity. Since then, Unicode has made a lot of efforts to expand the diversity of emojis:

📅In 2016, Unicode began exploring ways to allow users to freely choose the gender of emojis and considered expanding the range of occupation-related emojis, with a special emphasis on the diversity of female professions.

📅In 2019, Unicode 12.0 approved a range of emojis reflecting disabled individuals and diverse gender identities, such as Ear with Hearing Aid, Guide Dog🦮, and so on.

📅In 2023, Unicode15.1 introduced the direction modifier, which allows users to change the orientation of certain emojis, offering autonomy to orient them either to the left or right.

🔺：The gender of human-related emojis can be male, female and gender-neutral

These alterations have not only enriched the variety and choices of emojis but also elevated their inclusivity and expressiveness. Regardless of skin color, gender, profession, or culture, emojis strive to reflect the diversity of our society. This not only allows a greater number of individuals to see themselves represented in emojis but also enriches and streamlines our communication.

In the future, as the degree of societal openness and inclusivity continues to escalate, perhaps we will see even more previously overlooked individuals or concepts enter the public eye, securing their own niche within the world of emojis.

The enhancement of emoji diversity has undoubtedly laid a solid foundation for its evolution. With the increase in the varieties and quantities of emojis, they are able to convey a growing range of information. As a result, emojis are no longer confined to chat boxes📱 to fill the emotional void in online communications; their deeper value is gradually being discovered.

On social media, users from around the globe employ emojis to bridge language and cultural barriers, facilitating mutual understanding and communication. People have created an array of intuitive emoji combos to signify different meanings, such as 🥺👉👈(Shyness) or 👁️👄👁️(Shock). Complex emotions and information can be conveyed through a few simple emojis, significantly diminishing the communication challenges among people of different nations.

Beyond emotions and information, emojis have also begun to embody people's values, reflecting the cultural background of each user and even expressing some societal phenomena and trends. Furthermore, as emojis are more convenient to send than text and more likely to capture people's attention, they play a crucial role in disseminating🌪 news and shaping public opinion.

🔺：In the early days of the Russian-Ukrainian war, 🇺🇦,💛,💙 can be used to find ukrainians and express support for Ukraine

In 2015, the Oxford Dictionary📕 selected the emoji"😂" as the "Word of the Year," recognizing its apt reflection of that year's societal ideologies and emotions. This was the first time the award was bestowed upon a non-textual symbol, signaling the gradual transition of emojis from a communication tool to a digital language. Concurrently, their value and societal impact were also acknowledged.

The final significant aspect of the emoji’s evolution lie in the application of emojis. People's creativity and imagination have paved countless innovative avenues for the use of emojis, which are now ubiquitous in various fields.

The most commonplace applications are observed in advertising and marketing. As the fame of emojis has increased📈, co-branded collaborations between brands and emojis have become frequent in recent years. For example, in 2016, Pepsi🥤designed 70 unique emojis to adorn its cola cans to captivate consumers' attention and stimulate their desire to purchase. This entire campaign was promoted in over 100 countries worldwide.

🔺：Pic source：PepsiCo

In ads and promotions, emojis seem to have become a staple. Xiaohongshu, a well-known social app in China is characterized by having too many emojis in its posts because adding emojis to the texts can make the texts more attractive and enhance more attention🧐.

The inherently entertaining nature of emojis also makes them an easily integrated element in games🎮︎. Password Game, a newly released game with tremendous popularity has used emojis in the design of the gameplay. Users need to design a password according to the provided rules, one of which states, "Your password must include the current phase of the moon as an emoji."(Moon phase:🌑 🌒 🌓 🌔 🌕 🌖 🌗 🌘 🌑)

Even in the field of AI, a globally trending in 2023, emojis have found a place to exert their influence. A few months ago, we whimsically used emojis as prompts when generating images using AI drawing tools like Midjourney and Stable Diffusion and we surprisingly discovered this to be an incredibly simple yet useful method. We even wrote a blog post to share this interesting finding: 🧐New Discovery: Emojis are the Game Changer For AI-Generated Emojis.

Nowadays, emojis have permeated every corner of our lives, transforming our lives in ways we could not have foreseen.

Over the past fifteen years, emojis have evolved from simple emoticons to a universally🌏 accepted digital language. Following this trend, I believe there will be even more innovations and breakthroughs with emojis. On this special day, let us express gratitude to these tiny symbols for the convenience and joy❤ they bring to the world, as well as to all those who have contributed to the development of emojis. Let us collectively anticipate an even more thrilling and captivating future for emojis! Happy World Emoji Day!