The 9 Best New Emojis Coming to Your iPhone or Android Phone, Including the Bulging Smiley and Bigfoot
- New emoji proposals have been submitted for 2025
- Unicode and developers will continue to refine the designs
- New icons include Bigfoot and a ‘distorted face’
Yes, there’s an official organization responsible for emojis called the Unicode Consortium – and it’s just submitted its annual proposal for the new graphics we might see on the top iPhones and top Android phones in the next two years.
There are plenty of interesting additions in the list (via Emojipedia). We have a bulging, slightly overpowered smiley face (“distorted face”, above) that we imagine is widely used on social media; there’s also a Bigfoot-inspired one called “furry creature” (above right).
For those times when your friends or family are wrecking in a digital space – perfect for group chats – we have ‘fight cloud’ (top left), which looks like the usual cartoon image of a fight, with everything hidden with smoke and stars .
On the fighting theme, another proposed emoji shows two people wrestling (see below). For nature lovers, a new emoji called “killer whale” would increase the number of maritime-themed emojis to choose from.
Emoji approval
To complement the Unicode 17.0 proposals, we have another apple core, a trombone, a treasure chest and a picture of a landslide – so if you’re about to get hit by falling rocks and don’t have time to write a full post, you can send an emoji instead.
There are actually 164 new emojis in the proposal, but we’ve covered the most important icons – all the others are skin color variations on the ones mentioned above (in case you want wrestlers with two different skin tones, for example).
The procedure this year is the same as every year: the Unicode Consortium will continue to discuss these graphics and adjust their designs before final approval for the official new emojis is given in September 2025.
Then it’s up to Apple, Google, and everyone else (from Microsoft to Meta) to create their own version of these emojis and add them to their various software platforms. In the meantime, you’ll have to rely on a “distorted face” sticker or GIF.
