The Unicode Consortium has unveiled a relatively minor emoji update that would still add 217 options to your selection next year. Emoji 13.1 comes with seven brand new images: a heart on fire, a heart with bandages, a woman with beard, a gender-neutral person with beard, a face letting out an exasperated sigh, a face hidden in the clouds and a dizzy-looking face with spiral eyes. The rest is made up of new skintone grouping variants for the “couple with heart” and “couple kissing” emoji.
While there are only seven new graphics coming in 2021, that’s still seven more than what could’ve been a year with no fresh ones. The Consortium had to push back its annual Unicode Standard release by six months due to COVID-19: Unicode 14.0, which was supposed to come out in March 2021, will now be released in September. As Emojipedia explains, that means operating systems won’t be able to incorporate Unicode 14.0 updates until very late next year or in the first half of 2022.