Cupcake, Bagel, and Lobster Emojis Are Coming to Your Phone in 2018

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Everyone’s text messages are about to get a little more interesting: Unicode just announced the new emojis coming out with the Unicode Emoji 11.0 update in 2018, and we’ll be getting some very useful new food emojis.

The update includes 157 new emojis, and it’ll include new hair options for red hair, curly hair, white hair, and bald people; superhero and supervillain occupations; and a whole array of disembodied legs and feet.

The food emojis in particular have some much-needed updates. After the new update, we’ll have mango, lettuce, a bagel, a shaker of salt, a mooncake, a cupcake, and a lobster. It seems astonishing that we never had a cupcake emoji until now. How did we ever live without a cupcake emoji? And according to Grub Street, the entire state of Maine is ecstatic about the new lobster emoji.

The final emoji designs are not set in stone yet, and different vendors use different drawings, so the Google version of the cupcake emoji might not look the same as the cupcake emoji on Apple or Facebook. According to Emojipedia, however, the bagel emoji is likely to be a sliced bagel, to differentiate it from the doughnut emoji that already exists.

Every time Unicode releases new food emojis, one of them usually sparks some contentious debate. When the paella emoji came out as part of the Emoji 9.0 update, people in Spain were flabbergasted to see it was a “mixed paella” with seafood and peas, instead of a traditional Valencia paella. Unicode fixed the paella emoji in 2017, and now it has chicken, lima beans, and green beans.

This year, any food emoji controversy could well center around the bagel emoji design, because the sample version on Emojipedia appears to depict a toasted bagel, and New Yorkers tend to be adamant that it is never, ever OK to toast a bagel.

Of course, people in New York have access to fresh, warm, right-from-the-oven bagels that the rest of us can only dream about, so they don’t have to toast their wonderful bagels. I lived in New York for years, and during that time I’d have put my hand in the toaster before I put a bagel in there. But now I’m in the Midwest with a bag of mini bagels from the grocery store, so yeah, they’re going in the toaster. But does that mean the bagel emoji is a good bagel that was toasted by some terrible, renegade bagel criminal? Or is the bagel emoji a mediocre bagel? This issue will require further analysis.

There’s also a new salt emoji, and that one sounds like it will get a lot of use, especially for those of us who are feeling salty about the bagel emoji.

What do you think of the new food emojis?