The 72 New Emojis Are All About Throwing Shade

Watching the birth of a new litter of emojis is like solving a puzzle. Which of the phallic pictograms will become the new eggplant (cucumber and baguette are both in play)? Which will be the 100 of the bunch, beloved by all until it implodes from overuse? Which will a brand ruthlessly exploit until it's devoid of all other meaning? (Our vote is the wilted rose, which will be brutalized by Disney's gritty Beauty and the Beast remake.) And finally, which will be the quixotic slow-burn emoji that takes months to find a purpose for? On June 27, the Unicode Consortium will release 72 new emojis to the public, all of which you can peep in the elevator music-bedded video from Emojipedia above.

One thing we noticed about Unicode 9, though, is that it seems like its express intention was to give mean teens a feast of new ways to throw shade. From the outset there's a nauseous face, a lying face, and a black heart, which are all guaranteed to sting. There's literally a backhand emoji in here, which there can't be a kind use for, as well as facepalm, and shrug emojis. All this is before you even get to the creative ones, like the clown face (perfect for combining with the donkey emoji), the shamefully-dressed man dancing emoji (inherently awful), and the aggressively lunging fencer emoji for unsubtle attacks (en garde!). There's even a third place bronze medal emoji, for when you've deemed someone pathetic enough to call them the second loser.

There are a lot of nice emojis in Unicode 9, too. We'll be making excellent use of the kiwi, the adorable fox face, and the whiskey tumbler, but these joyful symbols are overshadowed by an anxious desire to prepare for comebacks for the shade to come. Tweet your best emoji comebacks to @CreatorsProject, because we need all the help we can get.

Read all of the new emojis in list form here.

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