Shady Characters

Welcome to the 2025 Shady Characters advent calendar! I’ll be counting down to Christmas by way of ten of the most interesting, controversial, and downright odd emoji to have appeared on our screens. Enjoy, and come back every other day or so for a new entry!

This emoji (🫩), which may or may not appear correctly on your device,* is called FACE WITH BAGS UNDER EYES. It’s a relative newcomer, gaining the Unicode stamp of approval only in 2024,1 and has been rolling out gradually across computers, smartphones and applications since then. Thanks to the vagaries of software update schedules, this means it is entirely possible that your current device is showing you a “missing character” symbol (‘▯’ or similar) rather than a tired-looking emoji face. Only by observing an emoji can we discover its true state.

That emoji can have this kind of quantum unknowability about them is interesting enough in itself, and we’ll come back to that later, but first I want to talk about another of FACE WITH BAGS UNDER EYES’ notable qualities: namely, its popularity. Or perhaps its unpopularity. It’s hard to tell. We’re still in Schrödinger territory.

Earlier this year, under its “World Emoji Awards” banner, Emojipedia named FACE WITH BAGS UNDER EYES as the most popular new emoji of 2025.2 But what exactly does “popular” mean?

Once upon a time, there was little argument. A site called emojitracker.com used a consider amount of technical wizardry3,4 to present a live leaderboard of all emoji used on Twitter, its scores ticking upwards every time an emoji was tweeted. It was a glorious, glittering thing: Twitter was the buzziest social network out there, and its firehose of new tweets made it the perfect place to track emoji usage. According to emojitracker’s maker, Matthew Rothenberg, by 2015 the Unicode Consortium itself was using his site to gauge the likely popularity of proposed emoji.4 And speaking personally, for me emojitracker was the very embodiment of the concept of emoji popularity; there were few other ways to gain such a direct insight into how emoji were being used in practice.

Then, in 2023, emojitracker stopped working.

Admittedly, the site was already lagging behind the times. Rothenberg had not updated emojitracker’s list of supported emoji for some years, so that many newer emoji never made it onto the emojitracker leaderboard.5 Then, early in 2023, a post-acquisition Twitter shut off the data feeds that made emojitracker possible, and emojitracker’s downfall was complete.6,7 Diminished though it was, it was still a shock for the foremost emoji popularity meter to be brought down so suddenly.

As of July 2025, however, emojitracker is back. But its notion of popularity has shifted, and not in a small way. Now part of the Emojipedia empire, the new emojitracker measures the number of times that Emojipedia’s users have copied any given emoji for use elsewhere6,8 — and this is the race which FACE WITH BAGS UNDER EYES won in order to be named the most popular emoji of 2025.

It isn’t entirely clear how emojitracker’s new algorithm will stack up to the older one. But a moment’s thought suggests it will favour both newer emoji (with which users are not yet familiar) and also older but less common emoji (with which they were never familiar). The reported popularity of the more mundane emoji in day-to-day use may suffer in comparison.

This is not necessarily bad. I’m glad that emojitracker works again! But it does highlight something about emoji that I think is easy to forget: for all that one might want to think about emoji in an objective way (what does this emoji mean? How is it used? How popular is it?), it is increasingly difficult to do so. Popularity differs depending on how one measures it, if it is even possible to measure it at all. Appearance differs depending on which device you are using, as FACE WITH BAGS UNDER EYES demonstrates. And as we’ve seen throughout this series, an emoji’s meaning can change depending on where you live, how old you are, your profession, or even your political leanings.

More and more, in other words, emoji are becoming like other languages and scripts — shifting and changing in the hands of their users, and in the hands of those who control their means of distribution. What is the most popular emoji? I’m not sure anyone can tell you. What does it mean? Ditto. These are the kinds of questions that give you bags under your eyes.

Thanks for reading! If you’d like to learn more about emoji, take a look at my latest book, Face with Tears of Joy: A Natural History of Emoji, available now from all good bookshops.

1.

Emojipedia. “Face With Bags Under Eyes Emoji”. Accessed November 26, 2025.

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2.

Broni, Keith. “The Most Popular New Emoji of 2025 Is. ”. Emojipedia (blog).

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3.

Rothenberg, Matthew. “How I Built Emojitracker”. Medium (blog).

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4.

Rothenberg, Matthew. “How I Kept Building Emojitracker”. Medium (blog).

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5.

Burge, Jeremy. “Emojipedia 🧡 Emojitracker”. Emojipedia (blog).

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6.

Broni, Keith. “Emojitracker Is Back”. Emojipedia (blog).

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7.

Stokel-Walker, Chris. “TechScape: Why Twitter ending free access to its APIs should be a ‘wake-up call’”. The Guardian, sec. Technology.

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8.

“Emojitracker: Realtime Emoji Use”. Accessed November 28, 2025.

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*

If you can’t see it but would like to, take a look at Emojipedia’s page. ↢

Welcome to the 2025 Shady Characters advent calendar! I’ll be counting down to Christmas by way of ten of the most interesting, controversial, and downright odd emoji to have appeared on our screens. Enjoy, and come back every other day or so for a new entry!

Ho ho ho! Nothing says Christmas like a water pistol, am I right? I will admit that as I sat down to write this post a good eight to ten months after first planning it out, it had not occurred to me at the time just how jarring the juxtaposition would be. The ironic thing, however, is that however bouba and kiki water pistols and Christmases may be, they are nowhere near as opposed as they would be if we were talking about the water pistol’s alter ego. Because this (🔫) is not how PISTOL was supposed to look. Once upon a time, emoji guns looked a lot more like real guns.

Many previous entries in this series have noted that emoji emerged from Japan in the late 2000s. The PISTOLs that entered common usage at that time, as drawn by Google, Facebook, Apple et al, were mostly modelled on real firearms: revolvers, automatics and even antique flintlocks. Microsoft was one of the few outliers, presenting its users with a PISTOL that resembled a science-fiction raygun. (You can view all these designs, historical and current, at Emojipedia’s 🔫 page.)

With this in mind, consider a pair of news stories that appeared in 2014 and 2015 respectively. First, in April 2014, a Baton Rouge murder suspect named Christopher Jackson sent a text message laced with PISTOL emoji which was later cited in a case against him.1 Then, in January 2015, NYC police picked up 17-year-old Osiris Aristy for a Facebook post that contained yet more ‘🔫’ emoji.2 We might laugh now, when PISTOL looks like a plastic toy, but the pixelated revolvers of the time had a rather more menacing aspect.*

The year after Aristy’s arrest, and under pressure from gun control advocates,5 Apple modified its PISTOL emoji to become the now-familiar green water gun. The other big emoji vendors followed in 2018,6 so that just two years after it had played a part in the arrest of two separate people, ‘🔫’ was now a quite different symbol.

How could this this shape-shifting come to pass? Well, the thing about characters on computer screens is that, at bottom, they aren’t visual symbols at all. Instead, they’re “code points”, or numbers, each of which identifies what the Unicode standard calls an “abstract entity”.7 PISTOL, in other words, isn’t a picture of a pistol; it’s a number which represents the concept of a pistol, and what that pistol looks like is up to whoever happens to want to draw it on screen. Thus it is that Google’s PISTOL can be different to Apple’s, Apple’s different to Facebook’s, and so on. It’s even possible for different versions of the same application to have different PISTOL emoji. It’s burgergate all over again.

As if to underline the matter, in 2024 a post-acquisition X changed its friendly green water pistol back into the form of a leaden grey handgun. Hardly the most offensive or belligerent act to be laid at the feet of X’s new owner, Elon Musk, but one which is, nevertheless, depressingly on-brand.8 Merry Christmas!

Thanks for reading! If you’d like to learn more about emoji, take a look at my latest book, Face with Tears of Joy: A Natural History of Emoji, available now from all good bookshops.

1.

Broussard, Ryan. “Text Message Helps Detectives Find Suspect in Shooting”. The Advocate.

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2.

Zavadski, Katie. “Brooklyn Teen Arrested for Emoji-Laden Threats Against NYPD”. New York.

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3.

Gyan, Joe. “Grand Jury Takes No Action in Baton Rouge Murder Case, Suspect to Be Set Free”. The Advocate.

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4.

Jouvenal, Justin. “A 12-year-old girl is facing criminal charges for using certain emoji. She’s not alone”. The Washington Post.

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5.

Dunne, Carey. “NRA Loses One As Apple Replaces Revolver Emoji With Squirt Gun”. Hyperallergic.

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6.

Burge, Jeremy. “Google Updates Gun Emoji”. Emojipedia (blog).

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7.

Unicode 17.0.0. “Chapter 1”. Accessed November 22, 2025.

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8.

Davis, Wes. “X Swapped Its Water Pistol Emoji With a Regular Gun, for Some Reason”. The Verge.

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*

Ultimately, neither Jackson nor Aristy faced any further action.3,4 ↢

Welcome to the 2025 Shady Characters advent calendar! I’ll be counting down to Christmas by way of ten of the most interesting, controversial, and downright odd emoji to have appeared on our screens. Enjoy, and come back every other day or so for a new entry!

Every now and again an emoji appears that makes the reader say “What is this? Why is it here? Who thought this was a good idea?” It is in the spirit of both asking and answering such questions that I give you ‘🕴️’, or PERSON IN SUIT LEVITATING.

The story of how ‘🕴️’ ended up in our smartphones will not be a novel one for readers who have been following this year’s Shady Characters advent calendar, although it is still worth telling. What may be less obvious is why an emoji of a levitating person in a business suit should exist in the first place.

Just as Unicode was created from a collection of older character sets, and just as emoji were adopted from Japan’s mobile phones1 and television sets,2 so other groups of characters are added to the Unicode standard from time to time. One of those sets, which debuted in 2014,3 came from a typeface called Webdings, which itself had been created by Microsoft all the way back in 1997.4 And Webdings, finally, was the birthplace of ‘🕴️’ — or rather, of a sober black-and-white version of the same symbol, because both Webdings and PERSON IN SUIT LEVITATING were artefacts of a monochrome, pre-emoji world.*

A Microsoft web page explains the company’s rationale for commissioning a new dingbat font:

Webdings is ideal for enriching the appearance of a Web page. Because it’s a font, it can be installed on the user’s system, (or embedded in the document itself) is fully scaleable and quick to render. It’s a perfect way of including graphics on your site without making users wait for lots of graphic files to download.4

This is almost exactly the same logic that led Shigetaka Kurita, emoji’s one-time founding father, to mint his emoji as a font rather than as individual images.5 Webdings never took off in computer-based writing in the way emoji have done for smartphones, but it’s not a stretch to say that the two had a lot in common.

Webdings’s eclectic collection of symbols† was a mix of iconic and symbolic, generic and specific. There were play/pause symbols; globes, maps and animals; planes, train, and automobiles. And then there was this guy: ‘🕴️’.

Webdings’ characters were drawn by Sue Lightfoot, Ian Patterson and Geraldine Wade of Monotype, the type foundry, and also by Vincent Connare of Microsoft itself. Connare, who had previously designed Comic Sans (yes, that Comic Sans), recounted for Newsweek in 2016 that a symbol labelled “jump” had caught his eye in Webdings’ list of prospective characters.

Connare connected some dots. He was a fan of lively, exuberant ska music, whose devotees often sported sharp suits, pencil ties and pork-pie hats, and Connare decided that “jump” would be best exemplified by a pogoing figure wearing those same clothes. He modelled his design on the logo of a record label called 2 Tone, which took the form of a louche, smiling figure clad in ska’s trademark uniform. 2 Tone, in turn, had based that logo on a 1965 photograph of a reggae musician named Peter Tosh. And so, not only does PERSON IN SUIT LEVITATING predate emoji, but it is one of the few — only? — emoji that can draw a line of descent back to a real person.6,7

No-one would argue that ‘🕴️’ has the reach of ‘😂’ or the usefulness of ‘✨’. Nor is it even clear what it means. Dasha Fayvinova of Bustle, who lays claim to the one (semi-)serious attempt to define the meaning of PERSON IN SUIT LEVITATING, places it on an extremely fuzzy spectrum which runs from “grumpy” to “fan of Quentin Tarantino’s opus, Pulp Fiction”.8 (Wisely, Emojipedia demurs on the matter.9) We are left, then, with one of the great emoji curiosities: a symbol that exists not because we need it, or because it serves some greater purpose, but mostly because it can.

Thanks for reading! If you’d like to learn more about emoji, take a look at my latest book, Face with Tears of Joy: A Natural History of Emoji, available now from all good bookshops.

1.

Scherer, Markus, Mark Davis, Kat Momoi, Darick Tong, Yasuo Kida, and Peter Edberg. “L2/10-132:/Emoji/Symbols:/Background/Data”. Unicode Consortium, April 2010.

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2.

Suignard, Michel. “L2/08-077R2:/Japanese/TV/Symbols”. Unicode Consortium, March 11, 2008.

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3.

Unicode. “Unicode 7.0.0”.

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4.

Microsoft Typography. “Webdings font family”. Accessed November 18, 2025.

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5.

Mariko Kosaka Power of Emoji. Ffconf 2016. Brighton, 2016.

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6.

Veix, Joe. “The Secret Ska History of a Little-Used Emoji”. Newsweek.

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7.

2 Tone Records. “The 2 Tone Label”. Accessed November 21, 2025.

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8.

Fayvinova, Dasha. “What Does Man In Business Suit Levitating Emoji Mean?”. Bustle.

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9.

Emojipedia. “🕴️ Person in Suit Levitating Emoji”. Accessed November 21, 2025.

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*

Unfortunately, some web browsers don’t do a great job handling characters which can be displayed both in colour and and black and white. For the moment, you’ll have to picture a monochrome version of this guy: ‘🕴️’! ↢

†

You can see Webding’s full set of symbols over at Wikipedia. ↢

Welcome to the 2025 Shady Characters advent calendar! I’ll be counting down to Christmas by way of ten of the most interesting, controversial, and downright odd emoji to have appeared on our screens. Enjoy, and come back every other day or so for a new entry!

If you spend even a modest proportion of your time online, you have almost certainly come across the SPARKLES emoji (✨). It’s a cheery and versatile symbol, and it is increasing found outside emoji’s usual habitat of text messages and social networks. Of late, in fact, SPARKLES has taken on a new gig that promises to significantly boost its profile, if not its popularity: ‘✨’ is now closely associated with that most divisive of technologies, AI.

Per Emojipedia, the SPARKLES emoji rode high throughout 2020 as the third most common emoji on Twitter after only ‘😂’ and ‘😭’. Keith Broni, Emojipedia’s editor-in-chief, attributed the emoji’s popularity to a rise in its use as a ✨whimsical✨, ✨magical✨ or ✨ironic✨ marker. Broni drew a comparison between this general pattern and the use of italics for the same purposes.1

Yet this temporary spike in popularity (‘✨’ was trending downwards by the end of 2020) was surely not enough to explain what happened next. As reported by Jazper Lu in the Wall Street Journal, in 2021 an “AI marketing” company named Jasper used the SPARKLES emoji in a marketing video — and from there, if indeed that was ground zero for the AI-sparkles fad, the practice spread like an airborne pathogen.2 By 2023, with a new wave of AI hype fuelled by a novel class of machine-learning algorithms called “transformers”, Spotify, Google, Zoom and OpenAI were all using ‘✨’ as a signifier for anything and everything connected to AI.3

Why did these titans of the tech world converge on ‘✨’? Lest you be deceived into imagining that the great and the good of the tech industry are any different to the rest of us, the answer is this: they couldn’t think of anything better. Lu cited “design and marketing executives” who claimed they had chosen the symbol simply because everyone else seemed to be making the same choice.2 This isn’t necessarily a bad reason — after all, if our various different computing devices employ conventions such as ‘🔍’ to mean “search”, or ‘💾’ for “save”, they are that much easier to use — but it doesn’t exactly speak to an industry which has scaled the heights of inspiration.

Groupthink aside, I do wonder if there is another reason for SPARKLES’ adoption as an AI mascot, and a ironic reason at that.

The basic properties of an emoji, such as its name, appearance, and numeric code point, are open to all. Although the Unicode Consortium claims copyright in its specifications, website, and other documents,4 it is nevertheless free and legal to build a computer system or typeface that makes use of Unicode’s work. Indeed, the internet of today would not work without Unicode’s accommodating approach to intellectual property: too many web pages and emails would arrive on our screens with unintelligible text and broken characters.

My thesis, then, is that the SPARKLES emoji’s lack of legal encumbrance makes it a tempting and low-risk choice. Google can use ‘✨’ to mean “AI”; Facebook can use ‘✨’ to mean “AI”; Microsoft can use ‘✨’ to mean “AI”; and they need not — indeed, cannot — waste each other’s time or money arguing in court over who owns it. I have no idea whether this is true or not (appropriately enough, Google’s Gemini chatbot didn’t know either), but it seems fitting that a legally charmed icon should become the symbol of a technology built on a foundation of voracious copyright infringement.

Thanks for reading! If you’d like to learn more about emoji, take a look at my latest book, Face with Tears of Joy: A Natural History of Emoji, available now from all good bookshops.

1.

Broni, Keith. “It’s Not Just You. The Sparkles Emoji Is ✨Everywhere✨”. Emojipedia (blog).

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2.

Lu, Jazper. “How the Sparkles Emoji Became the Symbol of Our AI Future”. Wall Street Journal, sec. Tech.

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3.

Cheng, Michelle. “How ✨ Became the Unofficial AI Emoji”. Quartz.

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4.

“Unicode Terms of Use”. Accessed November 9, 2025.

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