Rejected Emoji Proposals and the Hidden Machinery of Digital Speech

Thesis

Charlotte Buff’s Rejected Emoji Proposals is more than a curiosity cabinet of faces, foods, flags, dinosaurs, hand signs, and symbolic near-misses. It is a map of how digital culture becomes infrastructure, showing that an emoji is not accepted because it is charming, timely, or beloved by a small community, but because it can survive the unusual demands of Unicode: permanence, interoperability, legibility at tiny sizes, broad semantic utility, legal clarity, and implementation across platforms that must agree on abstract identity while disagreeing on visual style.

That distinction matters because emoji occupy a strange middle zone between language and software. A rejected emoji is not simply a drawing that failed to become popular. It is a proposed unit of text that failed to become part of the global character system described by Unicode Technical Standard #51, the specification that governs emoji behavior, presentation, sequences, variation selectors, and the data files used by operating systems, fonts, keyboards, search indexes, and messaging apps. Once a character is encoded, it becomes durable in a way that ordinary interface art does not, which is why Unicode’s emoji proposal guidelines demand evidence, licensing, distinctiveness, and resistance to duplication.

Key arguments

The first argument suggested by Buff’s list is that rejection is a form of standardization, not merely an administrative absence. The list includes proposals for sympathetic faces, PMS-related symbols, yogurt, soybean, triceratops variants, high five, hand signs, neuron, molecule, flags for subnational regions, image hash modifiers, menstrual products, white wine, religious symbols, scientific objects, accessibility-related items, and dozens of expressive face variants. This variety shows that Unicode is not deciding whether a concept exists in culture, because clearly it does, but whether that concept should become a permanent element in the shared textual substrate of computing.

The second argument is that emoji are governed by scarcity even though pixels appear cheap. A platform can draw a thousand stickers, reactions, or custom icons without asking the world to coordinate, but Unicode emoji are different because they must be encoded, named, categorized, searched, sorted, rendered, preserved, and interpreted across systems. A high five can be approximated with existing hand emoji, a squirrel can be represented by the existing chipmunk-like emoji according to Unicode guidance, and a sitting person was effectively replaced by a chair during the approval process. These substitutions reveal a practical philosophy: an emoji set should not model every desire directly if existing pieces can compose the meaning with tolerable ambiguity.

The rejected faces are especially revealing because facial expression seems, at first, like emoji’s natural home. Buff’s catalog includes frowning faces with lowered eyebrows, smiling faces with stars, angled-mouth skepticism, whistling, question-mark eyes, bruises, masks, clenched teeth, black clouds of frustration, and even competing piles of poo. Yet faces are also where duplication becomes most dangerous. A face proposal must prove that its expression is visually distinct at 18 by 18 pixels, semantically flexible enough to justify a new character, and not merely a slight emotional shade already expressible through existing symbols.

That technical constraint carries cultural consequences. Human expression is continuous, but encoding turns it into discrete tokens. The more fine-grained the emotional taxonomy becomes, the more likely each new face competes with an existing one, fragments meaning, or burdens keyboard design. Rejection therefore protects not only engineering simplicity, but also communicative density: a smaller set of widely understood signs may carry more shared meaning than a larger set of barely distinguished variants.

The third argument is that Unicode’s evidence model treats emoji as public infrastructure rather than personal advocacy. The current proposal process asks submitters to show frequency evidence from reproducible sources, compare terms using tools such as Google Trends and Ngram Viewer, provide licensed images, and address both inclusion and exclusion factors. Petitions, social media enthusiasm, and moral importance alone do not carry the same weight, because Unicode is trying to distinguish durable communicative demand from campaigns, brand pushes, temporary memes, and narrow constituencies.

This explains why the list contains many proposals that feel reasonable in isolation. White wine has cultural use, a neuron is scientifically meaningful, a gurdwara represents a real religious site, a raised little finger has social meaning, and many subnational flags matter deeply to the people who identify with them. The problem is not that these symbols lack significance. The problem is that Unicode must ask whether significance should become encoding, whether encoding one member of a class implies an open-ended obligation to encode many more, and whether existing mechanisms already cover enough of the communicative need.

The fourth argument is that emoji rejection exposes the difference between identity, image, and implementation. An emoji character is not a picture stored in Unicode. Unicode encodes the abstract character, while Apple, Google, Microsoft, Samsung, Meta, X, and other vendors draw their own glyphs. This is why sample images in proposals are useful but not definitive, and why an accepted emoji can look slightly different across platforms while still representing the same character. The standard has to be stable at the level of text, while visual expression remains partly local.

That separation becomes even more complex with zero-width joiner sequences, variation selectors, and tag sequences. A proposed emoji may be a single character, such as a new face or object, or a sequence combining existing characters into a new visible unit, such as person-related ZWJ proposals or regional flag tag sequences. The rejected list includes both kinds, which is a reminder that modern emoji are not a simple pictographic alphabet. They are a layered protocol for assembling text-like units out of code points, presentation controls, and rendering agreements.

The fifth argument is historical: the rejected archive records changing institutional taste. Earlier proposals from 2009 through the mid-2010s include compatibility symbols, broad cultural additions, dinosaurs, religious symbols, and many ideas that now read as products of a more expansionary period. Later entries show a process that has become narrower, more procedural, and more cautious. The Unicode page for Emoji Proposals Status and the formal proposal guidelines reflect an institution that has learned from abundance: every acceptance creates precedent, every precedent invites analogy, and every analogy becomes work for committees, vendors, font teams, keyboard designers, accessibility tooling, and users.

Implications

The largest implication is that digital speech is designed under conditions of governance, even when it feels casual. Emoji appear in the same mental category as jokes, reactions, flirtation, grief, sarcasm, and everyday social texture, but the path by which a new emoji becomes possible looks closer to standards engineering than to popular culture. A person cannot simply want an emoji into existence. They must translate desire into evidence, evidence into a proposal, a proposal into an abstract character argument, and that argument into a case that survives scrutiny by people responsible for the long memory of text.

That gives the rejected archive a philosophical weight. It shows the difference between expression as lived experience and expression as infrastructure. People experience missing emoji as gaps in representation, humor, identity, or practical communication, yet Unicode experiences each proposal as a possible permanent addition to a finite interface grammar. Both perspectives are valid, but they operate at different scales of responsibility.

For software builders, the archive is a reminder that standards solve coordination problems by refusing many good ideas. The web works because browsers implement shared standards, databases work because encodings remain stable, and text works because systems agree that a sequence of code points means the same thing even when fonts vary. Emoji inherit that discipline. The cost of acceptance is carried by everyone, not only by the person who wanted the symbol.

There is also a product lesson. When a platform wants highly specific expression, custom reactions, sticker packs, shortcodes, GIF search, or local icon systems may be better tools than Unicode encoding. Unicode should carry concepts that need to travel as text across many systems. Local systems can carry richer, narrower, more temporary, more visually specific expression without demanding global permanence.

The food proposals make this especially clear. Yogurt, soybean, sesame, celery, lupin, mustard, walnut, grain, almond, cabbage, hummus, white wine, and apple core each have plausible uses, but plausibility alone is not the same as global textual necessity. A grocery app, health tracker, recipe service, or restaurant platform can represent these things locally with images or tags. Unicode must decide whether they deserve to become part of the shared code of human-machine writing.

Another implication concerns cultural power. Unicode’s process attempts to be evidence-based, but evidence is never socially neutral. Search frequency favors concepts with strong web presence, dominant-language documentation, and communities whose cultural artifacts are easily measured by commercial search tools. A proposal for a culturally significant symbol may struggle if its importance is embodied in practice, ritual, oral tradition, local language, or offline community life rather than in indexed web pages.

This does not mean the process is arbitrary. It means that any global standard must choose imperfect proxies for need. Frequency data, multiple meanings, visual distinctiveness, and category completion are ways of making subjective judgments auditable. They also create blind spots, and Buff’s rejected list is valuable because it preserves traces of the ideas that did not fit those measurement systems.

Counter-perspectives

One counter-perspective is that the process may be too conservative. Emoji have become a major layer of informal digital expression, and many communities experience rejection as exclusion from the symbolic inventory of daily life. When Unicode declines a flag, religious symbol, medical object, gendered sequence, or culturally specific practice, the decision can feel less like technical restraint and more like a statement about whose meanings are considered general enough for the world.

That criticism has force, particularly because emoji are not merely decorative. They appear in activism, mutual aid, identity signaling, accessibility conversation, public health messaging, language learning, disaster communication, and emotional support. A limited set can unintentionally privilege familiar Western consumer categories while making other forms of life appear marginal, too specific, or too difficult to encode. The fact that a symbol is hard to standardize does not erase the human need behind it.

A second counter-perspective is that Unicode’s refusal to encode everything is precisely what keeps emoji usable. If every plausible food, animal, subculture, medical state, regional identity, profession, hand sign, and facial nuance became an emoji, the system would become harder to search, harder to render, harder to maintain, and harder for ordinary users to understand. More symbols can mean less communication if the shared interpretive base becomes too thin.

The rejected archive therefore does not tell a simple story of institutional failure or institutional wisdom. It shows a permanent negotiation between abundance and coordination. Emoji are born from expressive pressure, but they survive only if they can become stable technical objects. The rejected proposals are the shadow history of that negotiation, a record of the concepts that reached the door of the global text system and, for reasons practical, procedural, political, semantic, or visual, did not pass through it.