This article was published on February 8, 2016

Dumpling and fortune cookie may become emoji after successful campaign


Dumpling and fortune cookie may become emoji after successful campaign Image by: Dumpling Emoji v1 by Yiying Lu

New year, new emoji. In 2015, a campaign started by former New York Times journalist Jennifer 8. Lee and Yiying Lu, designer and Creative Director at 500 Startups, sought to get a dumpling emoji added to your phone.

Now, the campaign has successfully pulled it off, with the Unicode committee adding fortune cookie, chopsticks, takeout box and dumpling to the candidate list for the next release of the standard in June.

The two emoji join a plethora of others planned to be released, including green salad, baguette bread, croissant and shark. Last year we finally got taco, unicorn, cheese and burrito emoji when Apple released iOS 9.1.

The Kickstarter for the dumpling emoji has raised more than $11,000 so far and hasn’t even finished — it’s got three days left.

The <3 of EU tech

The latest rumblings from the EU tech scene, a story from our wise ol' founder Boris, and some questionable AI art. It's free, every week, in your inbox. Sign up now!

The group presented the emoji to the Unicode technical committee in late January, which must have gone well since Unicode has already added the emoji to the list.

PRI has a great podcast about the process to get an emoji added, and how the Unicode committee endeavors to figure out what should and shouldn’t be an emoji, since the amount of them could basically be endless.

The emoji standard, Unicode 9.1, will be released in June but phone makers likely won’t add them immediately. Apple has traditionally added them after its September event with a major release of iOS, but until then, we’ll have to wait.

Emoji candidates [Unicode]

Get the TNW newsletter

Get the most important tech news in your inbox each week.

Also tagged with