Proposing A New Emoji

The Unicode Consortium is the organization that makes sure symbols and text look the same on all computers. This system is called Unicode, and it’s an incredibly ambitious project, with >150.000 symbols encoded already.

These symbols can come from modern languages, like “a” or “å”.
Or they can be ancient: ”  ” from Mycenaean Greek, a language that has been dead for over 3.000 years.

And they can can be much more than that, for example: mathematical (“π”), currencies (“€”), technical (“⏻”, the on/off switch), or decorative (“❦”, a type of fleuron in typography).

☝🤓 And then there are emojis, of course!
At the time of writing, there are 3.790 emojis encoded in Unicode. And yet I still feel like one is missing:

The Stinky Trash Bag

(Draft design for reference)

So my mission is to have a stinky trash bag emoji.
I believe this would be an essential addition to our dataset of modern hieroglyphs.

If you have emoji ideas, too: I’ve written out my process below! But just a heads-up, my emoji has not been reviewed yet so I am no expert. And I’m afraid only very few actually get implemented (2024 saw a total of 7 new emojis, excluding variations on existing).

How To Write A Proposal

Luckily, until the end of July 2025, The Unicode Consortium is open to suggestions! If you missed this deadline, make sure to check their website again around March 2026.

If you have an idea, the first thing you’ll want to do is find out if your idea has already been submitted before on this page. Then, you can write the proposal document, answering questions such as: “Is is visually iconic?“, “Will it be used?“, and “Can it already be represented by another emoji or sequence?“.

You will need a design, but this is for reference only. Each app/platform will create their own visual in the end.

Here you can find proposals for emojis that have already been accepted!

These helped me out a bunch when writing this document. And if you’re curious, this is the proposal document that I submitted. It’s still in review, though – don’t use this as a reference for your own as it might not get accepted.

In November, I’ll get a status update on Stinky Trash Bag! 🤞