Google shares new YouTube Shorts effect and more for World Emoji Day

Today, as you all know and have been preparing yourselves for over the past few months, is World Emoji Day. As we set aside some time to ruminate on all the ways emoji positively impact our quality of life, Google’s dropping a few updates about what sort of emoji goodies are on the way for us soon.

Fancy yourself a YouTube Shorts creator? Or ever just have some fun messing around with the various video effects it supports? Google tells us that a new one will be rolling out to users sometime in the next few weeks, all focused around the mash-up possibilities of Emoji Kitchen. As the filter cycles through a couple emoji options, you’ll tilt your head to choose the ones you want to combine. And with Emoji Kitchen now supporting over 100,000 pairings, we’re sure you can discover some incredible combos.

We also get a little bit of a tease about what’s next for the expansion of emoji on Android. Unicode 16.0 is adding seven new emoji options to our library: a fingerprint, leafless tree, harp, splat graphic, face with bags under its eyes, a shovel, and a (here vaguely turnip-looking) root vegetable. News of these has been out for a few months already (and the imagery you see below isn’t even Google’s, but the original Unicode designs), but Google’s now getting specific about its timetable for inclusion, looking to add them to its Noto web fonts in September, bring them to Android phones by March 2025, and also getting them spread across the rest of Google’s ecosystem during the early parts of next year.

Not too keen about waiting that long to play with some new emoji? We don’t blame you, so why not try and scratch that itch by finding the most novel, silliest, or just plain weirdest combo you can come up with in Emoji Kitchen today?