What would we do without emoji? Texting would be bland and expressionless without them. We’ve formed unshakeable bonds with the dancing lady in the red dress, the shy monkey, the wide-eyed poop, and many more of them. Still, the more we explore and enjoy emoji, the more our need for variety increases. We realize just how expressive face-to-face communication can be, and our emoji libraries continue to expand to meet our ever-growing needs.
Apple has stepped up to the task as well, promising new, exciting emojis to look forward to with its iOS 15.4 update. In this article, we’ll look at all the new emoji in iOS 15 – iOS 15.4.
New Memoji Customization and Emoji in iOS 15.4
iOS 15 introduced new Memoji customization options, including over 40 different outfit options and three new colors to choose from. The iOS 15.4 emoji update builds on this and includes melting face, pregnant man, mirror disco ball, and multi-racial handshake emoji which can help people represent themselves better.
iOS 15.4 also includes seven new smiley emojis — the most pushed in a single update since 2017. The update has a specific focus on gender-neutral emoji in the form of the person with a crown and regnant person emojis. Seven hand gestures are also included, each with support for skin tone modifiers.
iOS 15 brought new Memoji stickers for iMessage and FaceTime, three new glasses options, and new accessibility options for depicting cochlear implants such as oxygen tubes and soft helmets. The new FaceTime features in iOS 15 go well with the new emoji improvements. Apple also included three new glasses, which are heart-shaped, star-shaped, and retro-shaped. You can also choose the color of the frame and the lenses.
Along with these, the iPhone maker added nine new Memoji stickers for sending a shaka, a hand wave, a light-bulb moment, and other expressions. You can now choose a different color for your left and right eyes, which is a great inclusive addition for people with heterochromia.
More Emoji To Come Your Way Soon
Apple adds new emoji to iOS on a nearly annual basis, regularly adopting the characters voted on and approved by the Unicode Consortium. This means it’s safe to expect that Apple will add even more options to our emoji libraries soon. The Unicode Consortium’s suggestions approved in September 2021 were included in this Emoji 14 update.
Emoji mockups from Emojipedia
A melting face, hand over mouth, a biting lip, peeking eye, saluting face, dotted line face, diagonal mouth, face holding back tears, and something we can all relate to — a low battery emoji are among the new emoji. There are also several new skin tones for emoji, such as the handshake (which was previously only available in the weird yellow skin tone), palm up hand, heart hands, handshake, and more.
We expect to see several miscellaneous items as well, such as beans, pouring liquid, wheel, hamsa, coral, lotus flower, empty nest, nest with eggs, jar, playground slide, x-ray, bubbles, and ID card.
These new emojis have been selected after a voting process and are now rolling out to smartphones through 2022.
However, the OS makers have an option to customize the design and final appearance of the emoji. This means the emoji you see in iOS 15.4 may not exactly match the same character on another operating system. If you have not already, make sure to check out all the other new iOS 15.4 features coming to your iPhone later this year. Apple is also making a number of improvements to Safari in iOS 15.
Let us know which ones you’re most eager to use. Till then, sayonara! 👋
