Jennifer Daniel has revealed some designs for the new emoji, and also something I didn’t realize about the existing butterfly 🦋 emoji.

The Monarch Butterfly

If this emoji looks familiar… you’re not going crazy. That’s because depending on what phone your friends use, you might have been texting them a Monarch butterfly while they were looking at a Morpho.

The blue Morpho is locked down globally as the symbol for “pretty aesthetics” and manicured Instagram feeds. The Monarch is an entirely different beast. This update finally fixes that fragmentation making way for Monarch butterfly to land in its own brand-new home. With its iconic orange-and-black stained-glass pattern, it introduces a different weight class of meaning, carrying a narrative of generational resilience, endurance, and deep ancestral memory. This is a creature that travels thousands of miles across continents over lifespans it will never see the completion of.

The emoji I am most excited for this year:

The Cracked Smiling Face

Because sometimes, “I’m fine!” means “I’m very much not fine!”

A visual externalization of an internal rupture. It’s the “Mask of Perfection” failing in real-time. It moves beyond standard emotion to capture the exact tension between your public persona and your private reality. Use it when your carefully crafted facade has cracked but you’re smiling through the shards.

…and I would be remiss for not mentioning:

The Pickle

“But Jennifer,” you ask, “We already have the cucumber 🥒!”

Listen to me: a cucumber is crisp, hydrated, and best served at the spa. A pickle has seen things. It has undergone a chemical transformation. Beyond being a critical asset for sandwich aesthetics and the American sport of pickleball, the pickle fills a massive semantic void: the tricky situation.

With this update, we are finally forcing a permanent split. The cucumber gets to stay a cucumber across all platforms, and the pickle is officially moving out and getting its own space to ferment.