Gingers have souls too: Here are the 2018 emoji candidates

The new beta is a preview of all the new emoji that might come in 2018. These draft candidates include redheads, cupcakes, and mangoes.

Unicode has just released the beta version of Unicode Emoji 11.0, set to be publicly released in 2018. It contains 130 “draft candidates,” new emoji that may or may not make the final cut come January 2018. According to the website, the final decision will be made next month, which will be announced in March, and the whole set of new emoji will be officially released sometime during the first half of next year.

Among these emoji candidates we find a teddy bear, mango, party face, skateboard, swan, lobster, peacock, but more importantly “Afro” hair, white hair, and redheads! Since the beginning of this year, there’s been a lot of buzz around what kind of new emoji Unicode 11.0 would bring. Many were happy to see that various hairstyles and hair colors (and bald emoji) were added as potential candidates to reflect the diversity in our world. It seems “red hair,” “white hair,” and “curly hair” have all survived up until now and will proceed to the final round.

As Emojipedia points out, in past years, most of the final candidates have been included in the final release, so here’s hoping that we will see these on our phones and laptops next year.

It’s also worth mentioning that Unicode has updated TR-51, its emoji documentation. A new section now outlines a ZWJ mechanism which will let the vendor switch directions of any emoji. For instance, you could change the direction of that runner emoji to face left or right depending on your preference.

For the full list of beta candidates, click here – which emoji would you like to see in the final release? What kind of emoji do you think we will see in the next version? Let us know by leaving a comment below!