Did you know there is a whole 🌎 behind the seemingly simple 😀 you see on your keyboard in your smartphone or tablet? I read today that there were 64 new emoticons that might be approved for general use next year by the Unicode Technical Committee. 
Well, I don’t know about you but I had no idea there was a committee needed to make sure everyone uses the same emoticons or emoji! 😨 So, my curiosity was roused, and I decided to delve a bit deeper and shine a light on this emoji stuff.🔦 This is on the committee’s official ‘about us’ page:💻
The Unicode Consortium is a non-profit corporation devoted to developing, maintaining, and promoting software internationalization standards and data, particularly the Unicode Standard, which specifies the representation of text in all modern software products and standards.
Quite a mouthful eh? 👄But on second thought I guess it makes sense that they want to make sure iOS, Android and PC users use the same language, not only in letters 📝 but in emoticons too. Did you know that the first emoticon was used 30 years ago by Scott Fahlman of Carnegie Mellon university in the US?🇺🇸 He thought of using the laughing smiley and the sad smiley to clarify messages. The university used electronic bulletin boards to put up their news, and after a little joke was misconstrued he decided it was time for more clarity. From that time on, a joke was followed by a 😃 and bad news by 😟.
Since that time a lot of smiley’s have been added, the time to just use smiley’s has been long gone, emoji’s for animals 🐶, food 🍰, travel ✈️ and lots of other examples have been added. Some message services like Facebook have their own emoji –vocabulary, and those are far more then just your average little emoticon! In June this year 41 new emoji where added, including the long awaited skin colors. 
Companies like Google or Apple are free to use them or not and are free to use different ones that haven’t been approved as standard too. Like Apple did, by adding the skin colors at the beginning of 2015. It’s just that when an Apple user used the skin color in an emoji to send to an Android user, the color would be back to the standard color. Only after Adroid added them too, the colors matched up again.
So, let’s see which ones are added next year of the 64 candidates. Only question I have left is: why don’t I have the Live long and prosper emoji on my iOS? Oh, and I do hope your browser allows for all these signs…otherwise you’ll have a strange blog post on your screen…sorry for that!