It's World Emoji Day: Science suggests using these tiny symbols makes you more likable
Get ready to sprinkle a few extra "zany faces" 🤪 and "fist bump" 👊 symbols into your texts -- today is World Emoji Day 🎉🎈🫶.
World Emoji Day started in 2014. It's celebrated every year on July 17 because that's the date shown on the calendar emoji 📅.
It's a day that celebrates how emoji help people express themselves in a quick, creative way.
To celebrate the day, Apple News+ on Thursday released Emoji Game, a new, digital puzzle in which you use emoji to complete three short phrases in as few moves as possible. The game is currently available to Apple News+ subscribers and can be found in the Puzzles section of the Apple News app, according to Apple.
Emoji were invented in 1999 by Shigetaka Kurita, a Japanese designer who wanted a fun and simple way to add emotion to digital messages. His original set had just 176 emoji, and they quickly caught on in Japan before spreading around the world. As of September 2024, the Unicode Standard includes 3,790 emoji. This count includes all solo emoji, skin tone and gender variants, flags, and combined sequences.
And new emoji are on the way. A draft list of 164 emoji candidates is set for approval by the Unicode Consortium in September 2025, which could bring the total to 3,954 emoji once officially released. Some of the proposed icons include a leafless tree, a face with bags under the eyes, and a harp.
Emoji are more than just a pretty face 💄🪞. They help add tone, emotion and personality to digital messages. A recent PLOS ONE study suggests that using emoji can make you seem more friendly and likable. People who added emoji in their texts were perceived as more responsive, which increased feelings of closeness, relationship satisfaction and likability compared to text-only messages.
"The reason we have emoji is that words alone don't really convey the emotional meaning or content of what we're trying to express," Dr. Helen Riess, an associate professor of psychiatry at Harvard Medical School and founder of Empathetics in Boston, told ABC News. "In digital texting, all of that is missing, and so there's just so much opportunity for misunderstandings."
Emoji are getting smarter and more expressive too. Tech companies are experimenting with 3D and animated emoji -- see Apple's "Animoji" and Telegram's interactive emoji effects -- to bring more emotion and movement into messages.
Scientists are also exploring how emoji can play a role in dialing down the temperature of online discourse and encouraging more respectful communication. For example, Google's Perspective API flags toxic language in real time and can suggest using emoji to soften the tone.
"A skillful emoji can act almost like a stop sign," said Riess. "It can stop a troll in their tracks to realize, 'Oh, I'm actually hurting this person.'"
So go ahead -- load up your texts with lots of ❤️🎢😎💥🫶🎯🧠👀 🤖💌🎈🗯️🙌🌈😜and 📢.
"They may be small," said Riess, "but emoji are doing some heavy lifting when it comes to human connection."
