You Can Officially Download The Avocado Emoji

Today it has been announced that the 72 emojis introduced by Unicode Consortium (the guys who brought the flamenco dancing girl emoji into our lives), can now be downloaded with the release of Unicode 9. And we can barely contain our excitement.

Just think of the possibilities… We’re talking avocadoes and bacon to really illustrate your Instagrammed brunch, a face palm emoji Prince George style and an actual selfie hand. Yes, Kim Kardashian will be thrilled.

The latest release has also seen the addition of sweet pairs for the lone emojis. So there’s finally a groom for the bride, a prince for the princess and a Mrs Claus for Santa. Aw.

And if that isn’t enough there’s a sneak preview of what might be to come in 2017...

Thanks to Emojipedia we’ve discovered that there could be fortune cookies, expanding female job roles and maybe even dinosaurs to flood our group chat. Because, why not?

Best get instagramming your brunch. There's bacon to be used.

On 20 August 2015 we wrote...

In the depths of a grizzly cold, how many times have you gone to look for a green-faced emoji to describe your woeful symptoms only to find it very obviously not there?

Or, perhaps you've been looking for a 'fingers crossed' character prior to that important interview?

Or maybe you want to describe your new 'clean eating' regime and the only image you can think of that properly gets it right, is the righteous (and insanely fashionable) avocado – and yet all you find yourself flicking between is the random bowl of soup and the tomato...

Well, come 2016, all that is set to change. Because the Unicode Consortium (the organisation which monitors global technological standards, to ensure computers can be used in any language worldwide) have given the OK to 38 emoji options for Unicode 9 (the next update of characters) – and the visuals for them have arrived.

Created by Joshua M. Jones, the emoji 'mockups' have been designed based on popular demand, 'gender-matching pairs' and 'compatibility with emoticons in existing platforms' say emojipedia.org.

The wondrous new characters include the above longed-for options – green face, fingers crossed, avocado – as well as a number of others: a pregnant woman, a man dancing (at last!), a selfie hand, bacon (oh yeah!), and a shrug.

Other potential options (still under consideration) are: green salad, baguette, sneezing face, butterfly, rhino, lizard and shopping trolley.

So, how long do we have to wait? Well, for them to reach our smartphones, firstly, the emojis have to be properly accepted by the Unicode Consortium. Then it's down to our smartphone brands – Apple, Microsoft etc – to update the software themselves, and all this is set to happen next year.

Which means we have quite a long wait.

Hmm... what are we going to do in the mean time?

Maybe not...