Rejected Emoji Proposals
65 points by carlana
65 points by carlana
Doesn't include my favorite (maybe it wasn't a formal proposal), the guillotine emoji: https://www.carrozo.com/guillotine-emoji
Cabbage
I'm in.
Still bitter about the Frisian flag. The planets are neat too!
Almost all of the flags are a political maintenance burden; most of them should have been rejected with a bit of foresight. Why doesn’t East Turkestan & every Canadian province get a flag? Why does Taiwan & the UK kingdoms (except Northern Ireland) get a flag? Why do some fonts support the flag of Catalonia despite? Why wasn’t the flag of Afghanistan updated in most emoji libraries? Why would the Unicode Consortium (then later the fonts themselves) get both the power to decide but also want the burden of arbitration / fighting about who & what gets a flag?
It’s good to see this is the direction moving forward, but the Pandora’s box is open with so much usage despite the problems.
What if I submit a proposal for a flag despite this policy?
Your proposal will not be processed.
I'm still annoyed that squirrels and chipmunks share the same emoji (admittedly chipmunks are technically part of the squirrel family) and most of the emoji illustrations chose to illustrate a chipmunk and not a squirrel!
and most of the emoji illustrations chose to illustrate a chipmunk and not a squirrel
I’d certainly hope that they’d draw 🐿 U+1F43F CHIPMUNK as a chipmunk. Don’t like what happened with a handful of emoji like U+1F52B PISTOL.
Chipmunk is easily close enough for squirrel, in a world where we don’t even have a pelican. (And I don’t think there should be more than one pelican… no California Brown for you, sorry. Though I do think adding black swan as {SWAN}{ZWJ}{BLACK LARGE SQUARE} would make sense, that feels a big enough difference to be worth encoding.) Incidentally, Indian palm squirrels (common in urban Hyderabad, where I live) look very similar to chipmunks. Slightly different patterning, proportions and posture, but easily confusable.
Looks like ouroboros occupies this weird intermediate state of being rejected but not having any details attached 😢.
You still have some times to propose a new emoji this year.
The full list of previously proposed emoji. https://unicode.org/emoji/emoji-proposals-status.html
not listed here, probably since none of its proposals were published to the document registry, but the most-rejected emoji is cannabis (declined 7 times!)
Why is a Swedish paper company proposing emojis for PMS face and period panties? 😂
Probably part of a marketing stunt, at the time they also made menstrual pads. (Which has since been spun off into a separate company.)
The footnotes are the most interesting part of this article for me. E.g. TIL there's a symbol for "permanent paper". I've seen it everywhere, but it never registered in my brain before.
It has never been clear to me whether there is an informal policy to avoid anything remotely sexual or if people just haven't been making those proposals. I guess it's largely the latter? The lists of rejected emoji in the "body part" and "activities" categories are surprisingly spare.
(Oh, though I guess there's a few more in the full list.)
Very sad that chef's kiss has not made it in... 🤌 doesn't quite cut it for my usecase
I had no idea ♾️ refers to the acid-free/permanent paper symbol and not infinity. interesting! especially because my emoji picker brings it up on searching "infinity".