99. Emoji

Summary

The Economics of Everyday Things: Episode 99 – Emoji

Release Date: July 14, 2025
Host: Zachary Crockett
Guest: Jennifer Lee
Produced by: Freakonomics Radio Network

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Introduction: The Missing Dumpling Emoji

In this intriguing episode of The Economics of Everyday Things, journalist Zachary Crockett delves into the ubiquitous yet often overlooked world of emoji. The episode begins with a relatable anecdote from Jennifer Lee, whose discovery of a missing dumpling emoji sparked her deep dive into the origins and evolution of these digital icons.

Jennifer Lee recounts:

"We were texting about dumplings because that is what we do as Chinese ish women... How is there no dumpling emoji? Like, clearly the world is broken."
[01:13]

This observation not only highlighted a gap in digital communication but also ignited Lee's passion for understanding and expanding the emoji lexicon.

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The Evolution of Emoji: From Emoticons to Global Symbols

Lee's curiosity led her to explore the history of emoji, tracing their roots back to emoticons—simple text-based expressions like ":)" and ":P" used to convey emotions in digital conversations.

Jennifer Lee explains:

"They basically are facial expressions that are denoted through punctuation."
[03:39]

The transition from emoticons to emoji marked a significant shift. In 1999, Japanese cell carrier NTT Docomo introduced a set of 176 unique 12x12 pixel icons, blending images with text to enhance digital communication. These icons, called "emoji" (a combination of the Japanese words for "picture" and "character"), included hearts, moons, cars, and other everyday items.

However, a challenge soon emerged: each carrier had its own set of emoji, leading to compatibility issues across different devices. For instance, a winky face sent from an iPhone to a Samsung phone might appear as an empty box or a question mark.

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Standardizing Emoji: The Role of the Unicode Consortium

To address interoperability, the tech industry turned to the Unicode Consortium, an organization responsible for standardizing characters across digital platforms. In 2007, a proposal to standardize emoji was accepted, allowing for a unified encoding system.

Jennifer Lee details the technical aspect:

"All digital characters have a tiny piece of character real estate... They're looking up those zeros and ones in their emoji phone."
[07:34]

This standardization ensured that emoji could be universally recognized, although the visual representation varied by device manufacturer. Each company, such as Apple, Google, Meta, Microsoft, and Adobe, designs its unique version of each emoji, adhering to the Unicode standards but infusing their own aesthetic.

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The Process of Creating and Approving New Emoji

Adding new emoji involves a rigorous process overseen by the Unicode Consortium. Proposals can come from both the public and member organizations, typically submitted between April and July each year.

Jennifer Lee outlines the criteria:

"Anything that is trademarked... Is it visually distinctive? Is there sufficient demand for this visual iconography?"
[15:02]

Certain categories are outright banned, such as trademarked symbols, deities, and living persons. Practical considerations include visual distinctiveness and cultural relevance. For example, the introduction of the orange heart emoji filled a gap where users previously had to use unrelated symbols like pumpkins.

Sometimes, iterations of an emoji are necessary. The mushroom emoji, initially red and white (often associated with poisonous mushrooms), saw a brown variant introduced in 2023 to represent edible types.

Notable Incident:
The mousetrap emoji faced criticism from PETA for its depiction of harm to animals. In response, the emoji was redesigned to a more benign cardboard box with a stick and cheese, inadvertently leading to its popular use in contexts like "thirst traps" on social media. Lee humorously remarked on its unexpected popularity:

"Every emoji has its day. Who are we to judge?"
[17:32]

Despite nearly 3,800 approved emoji, only a small fraction of public proposals (approximately four to eight) are accepted each cycle, highlighting the stringent selection process.

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Design Diversity and Corporate Influence

Each tech company’s approach to emoji design reflects its organizational structure and priorities. For instance, at Apple, the emoji design team reports to the mobile platform division, whereas at other companies, it might fall under iconography design or even marketing.

Jennifer Lee observes:

"It really says a lot about an organization and how they think about emoji by like which org it is within the tech company."
[08:37]

The original set of emoji, created in 2008 by design intern Angela Guzman, emphasized meticulous detail—from the leather stitch on footballs to the freckles on eggplants. Over time, companies like Google have adapted their designs to align more closely with industry standards, ensuring uniformity and user familiarity.

Although these design efforts do not directly generate revenue, they play a crucial role in user engagement and device updates, as new emoji often necessitate operating system upgrades, which can include important security patches.

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Cultural Impact and Communication Enhancement

Emoji have transcended their initial purpose as mere decorative elements in digital communication. They function as a form of paralanguage, conveying emotions and nuances that text alone might miss. For example, the addition of a laughing face emoji can transform a plain statement like "I hate you" into one laden with sarcasm or jest.

Jennifer Lee notes:

"Like, spill the tea... what's the tea?"
[20:45]

Moreover, emoji serve as ideograms, representing broader concepts beyond their literal meanings. This versatility has made them integral to modern communication, especially among younger generations who process information more visually.

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Economic Implications and Business Integration

The widespread use of emoji has significant economic implications. Businesses leverage emoji for marketing, user engagement, and enhancing customer interactions. For example, Domino's allows customers to order pizza using the pizza emoji, and many companies incorporate emoji into email subject lines to increase open rates.

Jennifer Lee discusses brand involvement:

"Brands are also constantly trying to influence the new emoji that Unicode rolls out."
[21:22]

From Ford's pickup truck emoji to Timberland's boot emoji, brands see value in having their products represented digitally. However, genuine and user-driven proposals, like Lee's dumpling emoji, tend to have more lasting impact compared to those driven purely by corporate interests.

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Conclusion: The Enduring Legacy of Emoji

Jennifer Lee's initiative to introduce the dumpling emoji not only fulfilled a cultural need but also exemplified the profound impact that a single emoji can have on billions of users worldwide. Her efforts underscore the intricate balance between standardization, design creativity, and cultural representation in the digital age.

Jennifer Lee reflects on her achievement:

"It's like, I've impacted billions of people. I mean, in a tiny, tiny, tiny little way, but still across billions of people. But it's kind of cool."
[22:08]

As emoji continue to evolve, they will undoubtedly remain a fundamental aspect of digital communication, shaping how we express ourselves and connect with others globally.

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Produced by: Zachary Crockett and Sarah Lilly
Mixed by: Jeremy Johnston
Additional Assistance: Daniel Moritz Rapson

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This summary captures the essence of Episode 99, providing insights into the economic and cultural significance of emoji, the meticulous process behind their creation, and their pervasive influence on modern communication.

Transcript

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[Zachary Crockett]

Back in 2015, Jennifer Lee was texting with her friend when they noticed something was missing from their iPhones.

[Jennifer Lee]

We were texting about dumplings because that is what we do as Chinese ish women. And I sent her a picture of dumpling. She sent me back a bunch of emoji, which is like, yum, yum, yum, yum, yum, yum, yum. Knife and fork, knife and fork, knife and fork. And then there's like this pause and she's like, oh, apple doesn't have a dumpling emoji. And I was like, huh, that's really strange because every culture basically has their equivalent of yummy goodness inside a carbohydrate shell. You know, empanadas, pierogi, ravioli, khinkali, palmini. Dumplings are universal. Emoji were also universal. How is there no dumpling emoji? Like, clearly the world is broken.

[Zachary Crockett]

And that discovery raised a question that Lee had never thought about before.

[Jennifer Lee]

I was like, where do emoji come from?

[Zachary Crockett]

By one estimate, we send around 10 billion emoji every day in text messages, social media posts, dating apps, emails, and workplace chat rooms. That's around 115,000 of them every second. And the craze extends beyond the keyboard. There are emoji, plush toys, stickers, books, jewelry, even an emoji movie that grossed more than $200 million at the box office. Most of us instantly recognize the laughing face, the pile of poop, the eggplant, and the skull. But it's less known who decides which emoji make it onto our phones, who designs them, and how they're changing the way we communicate.

[Jennifer Lee]

I would argue that emoji are our first natively digital communication form do you have kids who can read and write emoji can read and write their native language. They can send something to grandma at.

[Zachary Crockett]

Like age 2 for the Freakonomics radio network. This is the economics of everyday things. I'm Zachary Crockett. Today emoji Jennifer Lee is a person who takes her curiosity to an extreme. After she got angry about that missing dumpling, she became obsessed with emoji. She co founded Emoji Nation, a collective that advocates for new designs. She launched an emoji conference called Emojicon. And she became involved with the Unicode Consortium, the organization responsible for approving and standardizing emoji.

[Jennifer Lee]

So all emoji, all the time.

[Zachary Crockett]

Lee says before emoji, there were emoticons.

[Jennifer Lee]

They basically are facial expressions that are denoted through punctuation. So semicolon parentheses for wink or like colon, capital P for like sticking out the tongue.

[Zachary Crockett]

The first emoticons were used in print back in the 1880s. But it wasn't until the 1980s that a computer scientist at Carnegie Mellon sent the first digital emoticon, a sideways smiley face.

[Jennifer Lee]

When you get into the world of communicating through email and then AO instant messenger in the 90s, then conversation gets transmitted through text rather than through voice. And then these emoticons were used to sort of give more context to those more casual conversations.

[Zachary Crockett]

In 1999, a team of designers of the Japanese cell carrier NTT Docomo took things a step further. They created a set of 17612 by 12 pixel icons designed to be used on pagers and cell phones. Hearts, moons, cars, planes and drinks. These new icons were called emoji, a combination of the Japanese words for picture and character.

[Jennifer Lee]

And then the other carriers created their own. But the tricky thing is they weren't interoperable.

[Zachary Crockett]

So.

[Jennifer Lee]

So if you were docomo, you could basically only message using those emoji with people who were also DoCoMo.

[Zachary Crockett]

As emoji grew in popularity in Japan, American tech companies decided to get in on the trend.

[Jennifer Lee]

You had Google and Apple bringing their operating systems on their phones into Japan. And Japanese people felt really strongly that they had to have emoji. You get into the situation where, okay, now instead of being only used on a phone as part of maybe a simple text message, you had to have the emoji move from the keyboard to email. So suddenly you have this need for them to be interoperable.

[Zachary Crockett]

It was a big problem that each carrier had its own encoding system. When you sent a winky face from an iPhone to your friend's Samsung phone, they'd see an empty box or a square with a question mark inside, or even nothing at all. So technologists turned to the Unicode Consortium.

[Jennifer Lee]

Most of what Unicode did historically was they took languages, Arabic or Aramaic or Hebrew or Chinese or Korean or Russian, and then they took these writing systems and then just created a standardized encoding system across everything. So one code to rule them all kind of thing. That's why it's called Unicode. In 2007, there were a bunch of engineers that brought a proposal to Unicode to standardize emoji.

[Zachary Crockett]

That proposal was accepted, and today Unicode publishes a set of standards for emoji, just as it does for the sets of characters that we use to write English or Japanese or Arabic. The committee is largely controlled by tech companies Apple, Google, Meta, Microsoft and Adobe, which each pay a $50,000 annual membership for voting rights. These companies primary concern is ensuring that text works properly across devices and that the standards are responsive to their technical needs. But they also have the right to decide which emoji should be included on our devices. Every year, they vote on proposed new emoji. The ones that are approved are awarded a digital code that's recognized across devices and platforms.

[Jennifer Lee]

So basically, all digital characters have a tiny piece of character. Real estate, like imagine you have a city full of addresses, and every character gets its own little tiny address, which is just a sequence of zeros and ones. When you are sending emoji, you're not sending a picture, you're literally sending a little string of zeros and ones. So you pick the poo emoji onto your phone and then you send it to someone, and as it goes, it's zeros and ones, right? And on the other side, if they have a different device or if they are on a laptop or a tablet, they are getting this zeros and ones. They're not getting a picture, they're getting zeros and ones. They're looking up those zeros and ones in their emoji phone. Boop.

[Zachary Crockett]

This code makes sure that your friend Samsung knows that the emoji you sent from your iPhone was a winky face. But that doesn't mean the winky face she sees looks exactly like the one you sent. Because while Unicode decides which emoji get digital codes, each device maker is responsible for designing its own take on them.

[Jennifer Lee]

One of the most interesting things in these big tech companies is where the emoji group rolls up to, right? So in some cases, it rolls up into the mobile platform division. In some places, it rolls rolls up into like little iconography design. In other cases, it rolls up into marketing, which is the strangest place for emoji to roll up to. But it really says a lot about an organization and how they think about emoji by like which org it is within the tech company at Apple, the.

[Zachary Crockett]

Original set of icons, which debuted in 2008, was largely created by a design intern named Angela Guzman. She spent three months carefully considering everything from the leather stitch on the football to the freckles on the eggplant. Google has its own design team and its own aesthetic, although in recent years its emoji have become more like other companies. These tech companies don't get any revenue from the work they put into emoji, but users like them, and there's an incentive to constantly add new ones.

[Jennifer Lee]

The annual ish upgrade of emoji forces people to upgrade their operating systems on their phones, which is often how you get security patches through. So emoji often forces waves of security updates through the world.

[Zachary Crockett]

So how does a new emoji make it onto the world's smartphones? And how are these little icons changing the way we communicate? That's coming up. The Economics of Everyday Things is sponsored by Square. Your favorite neighborhood spots run on Square. Square can help you turn your business idea into a huge success. Yes, even that brilliant idea for Ugly Lamp Market, the shop specializing in gloriously hideous lamps. Square isn't just a point of sale for local businesses anymore. What began as a little white card reader is now a behind the scenes powerhouse, helping you manage finances, schedule your team and cover cash flow gaps when they come up. With Square, you could keep things at Ugly Lamp Market running smoothly even when someone tries to return a lava lamp shaped like a flamingo because it's too refined. And whether you're expanding to new cities or growing your loyal following of light loving fans with questionable taste, Square is with you every step of the way. Square helps you tackle today's to DOS and bring that big light bulb idea to life tomorrow. Literally. Go to square.com go economics to learn more. That's sq U-A-R-E.com goeconomics square meet you there. The Economics of Everyday Things is sponsored by Mint Mobile. You know what doesn't belong in your epic summer plans? Getting burned by your old wireless bill. And for a limited time, Mint mobile is offering three months of unlimited premium wireless service for 15 bucks a month. Say bye bye to your overpriced wireless plan's jaw dropping monthly bills and unexpected overages. Mint Mobile is here to rescue you. All plans come with high speed data and unlimited talk and text delivered on the nation's largest 5G network. Ditch overpriced wireless and get three months of unlimited service from Mint Mobile for 15 bucks a month this year. Skip breaking a sweat and breaking the bank. Get this new customer offer and your 3 month unlimited wireless plan for just 15 bucks a [e-mail] economics that's mintmobile.com economics upfront payment of $45 required, equivalent to $15 per month limited time new customer offer for first 3 months only. Speeds may slow above 35 gigabytes on unlimited plan. Taxes and fees extra. See Mint Mobile for details. The Economics of Everyday Things is sponsored by Constant Contact. You want to grow your business? Who doesn't? Everyone will tell you it comes down to saying the right thing at the right time to the right people. But how do you know what right is? Luckily, Constant Contact is here to help with their all in one platform. You can create and manage attention grabbing campaigns in just a few clicks. Email, text, social media events, landing pages, you name it, it's all in one place. Constant Contact's AI Content Generator helps you turn a rough idea into a ready to go message faster than ever. And with hundreds of customizable templates, it's easy to make something that looks and reads like your brand. You also get automated sending, real time reporting and tools that help you actually drive sales. So you're not just marketing your business, you're growing it. Get a free 30 day trial when you go to constantcontact.com Try Constant Contact free for 30 days at constantcontact.com constantcontact.com Most proposals for new emoji come from the voting members of the Unicode Consortium, the big tech companies. But normal people also get to weigh in.

[Jennifer Lee]

The Unicode Consortium takes in proposals from the public. We're actually in the middle of emoji proposal season.

[Zachary Crockett]

There's a season?

[Jennifer Lee]

Yes, it's basically beginning of April till the end of July. Every year people can send in their emoji proposals and then they're considered by the committee, and then through lots of rigorous debate and deliberation, and then a certain subset of them are encoded every year in the Unit Unicode Update.

[Zachary Crockett]

Lee is a member of the Emoji Standard and Research Working Group at Unicode, and she says there are a few criteria a new emoji has to meet. Certain things are outright banned.

[Jennifer Lee]

Anything that is trademarked. So no McDonald's arches, no Nike swoosh, none of that. No deities and no living people type emoji. Those are like not going to happen.

[Zachary Crockett]

Then there are a series of practical questions.

[Jennifer Lee]

Is it visually distinctive? Is there sufficient demand for this visual iconography? Is this already used in certain kinds of situations? There was also often a completeness kind of set. This is really important for, like, the orange heart, because there was like, red heart, yellow heart, green heart, blue heart, purple heart, black heart. I think there was no orange heart and people would use a pumpkin. So that was a really big argument for it.

[Zachary Crockett]

Sometimes a second iteration of an emoji is created because the existing one doesn't quite fit the bill. Take, for instance, the mushroom emoji. The original design, which debuted in 2010, is red and white, which is often poisonous in the wild. An argument was raised that there should be an edible mushroom. And Unicode ended up introducing a Brown version in 2023. If a proposal is seriously considered, Unicode will advance it to a design mock up stage. They might consult experts in whatever field the emoji is related to. If it's a depiction of a temple, they'll talk with religious leaders and make sure it's accurately portrayed. And in some cases, they'll run into problems with ideas that seem innocent on paper.

[Jennifer Lee]

One that I thought would never see the light of day because it had this very interesting path was the mousetrap emoji. PETA, People for the Ethical Treatment of Animals, wrote a letter to the Unicode Consortium complaining about how this was cruel. You know, these kinds of devices broke limbs. So the tech companies redesigned the mousetrap emoji to basically cardboard box propped up with a stick and a piece of cheese underneath it. Like, literally, who builds a mousetrap like that? And I'm like, oh, my God, no one's ever gonna use this. And then I was talking to someone, they're like, oh, no, no, no. You see it all over Twitter. And then I looked, and people use it for Thirst Trap. So there are all these selfies of people at the mirror half naked with the mousetrap emoji on it, which is ridiculous for so many reasons. But I was like, every emoji has its day. Who are we to judge?

[Zachary Crockett]

There are now nearly 3,800 Unicode approved emoji, but in any given year, only a few of the new proposals from the public make it through.

[Jennifer Lee]

There are probably four to five hundred emoji proposals submitted each cycle, and maybe like four to eight make it out. I mean, it's infinitesimally small.

[Zachary Crockett]

It can take nearly a year for a new emoji to be approved by Unicode, and then up to another year for all the tech companies to create their own designs and roll them out on their devices. Users sometimes have strong reactions to those designs.

[Jennifer Lee]

Apple did a bagel emoji with, like, no cream cheese, and people were like, what is this? And then they introduced one with cream cheese.

[Zachary Crockett]

Emoji might also get subtle updates based on current events.

[Jennifer Lee]

The syringe used to be bloody, and then we went through Covid and suddenly we were like, no blood in the syringes. The most dramatic one, obviously, is a gun emoji, which was a gun. And then Apple decided, just kid, and we're going to make it a green water gun. And then everyone kind of came along, made it a green water gun. And then Elon bought Twitter, and they're like, nope, I'm going to make it back into a gun gun. And so Twitter has a gun gun, while everyone else now still has a colorful water pistol.

[Zachary Crockett]

Lee says that flag emojis pose a particular challenge.

[Jennifer Lee]

Unicode takes very little responsibility for flags. Basically, they just followed a country code as recognized by the un Unicode's trying.

[Zachary Crockett]

To stay out of politics, basically.

[Jennifer Lee]

Well, they shouldn't be deciding, like, what is a country. Someone else decides at.

[Zachary Crockett]

Flags make up a large portion of the emoji keyboard. There are more than 250 of them in Apple's library. But they're used a lot less than some other popular emoji. For years, the most widely used emoji was the Face with Tears of Joy. It was even named Word of the year in 2015 by Oxford Dictionaries. But a recent analysis of social media posts shows that the title might now belong to the Loudly Crying Face. That shift may be a sign of our times, because, as it turns out, the emoji we use can tell us a lot about public sentiment.

[Jennifer Lee]

Like, in the same way that gestures or facial expressions are meant to complement literal words, emoji convey meaning so you could tell if someone was being sarcastic or playful.

[Zachary Crockett]

In the field of linguistics, emoji are what scholars call paralanguage. They're used to communicate things that can get lost in written text. Sometimes they can change the entire meaning of a message. A text that says I hate you reads differently when it's partnered with a laughing face emoji. But emoji aren't just used to convey emotion. They're designed to be pictograms, literal representations of objects. To the Unicode Consortium, an eggplant is just an eggplant. In practice, though, emoji are often used as ideograms, symbols that represent a concept.

[Jennifer Lee]

A skull Means like laughing myself to death. Like, oh, that was so funny, I could die. Or there's spill the tea. Like, oh, what's the tea?

[Zachary Crockett]

More than 60% of younger people say they process information faster when it's presented in visual form. Corporate America has tried to latch onto this trend. You can order food from Domino's by texting them a pizza emoji. And many companies now use emoji in email subject lines to boost their open rates. Lee says that brands are also constantly trying to influence the new emoji that Unicode rolls out.

[Jennifer Lee]

We get a lot of proposals from brands. Some of them are terrible, some of them are good. Ford had someone do a pickup truck emoji. Timberland helped with the boot emoji. Tinder helped with the interracial couple emoji. You know, white wine emoji. There's a big push from the white wine people because they feel like it's very qualitatively different than red wine.

[Zachary Crockett]

But the emoji that tend to make it through usually start with a genuine desire to see a beloved object represented. That was the case for Jennifer Lee after she realized that there was no dumpling emoji back in 2015, she and some friends submitted a proposal. It made its way through Unicode's process and was approved a year later. It was on her phone.

[Jennifer Lee]

It was just amazing. It was so lifelike. It was unambiguously a realistic rendition of a boiled dumpling. And not like, oh, some kind of carby thing with creases. How often do you get to say, I've impacted billions of people? I mean, in a tiny, tiny, tiny little way, but still across billions of people. But it's kind of cool.

[Zachary Crockett]

For the economics of everyday things. I'm Zachary Crockett. This episode was produced by me and Sarah Lilly and mixed by Jeremy Johnston. We had help from Daniel Moritz Rapson.

[Jennifer Lee]

Someone sends you red heart, brown heart, yellow heart. You know, like, trip, trip, trip, trip. And you're just like, this is ridiculous. The Freakonomics Radio Network the hidden side of everything.

[Zachary Crockett]

Stitcher.

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When work gets crazy, I like to stop by the bar after, have a few cold ones.

[Zachary Crockett]

I don't drink at all until 4 o'. Clock.

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We limit ourselves to one bottle of wine a night.

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Excessive drinking has a way of sneaking up on us. A few drinks, a few nights a week, it can add up. And suddenly we're at greater risk for long term problems like heart disease, cancer and depression. Depression Reason enough to rethink the Drink. [e-mail] Noha Initiative.

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