Version 13 of the Unicode Emoji was announced yesterday by The Unicode Consortium, a non-profit that standardizes languages across digital platforms and devices. Included in this new version are a ninja, a transgender flag, polar bear, and BUBBLE TEA. At long last, our patience has been rewarded.
This comes as another huge win for Asian representation. There has been so much momentum in the last few years with movies such as Crazy Rich Asians, The Farewell, Searching; TV shows such as To All The Boys I've Loved Before and Killing Eve, A Little Late with Lilly Singh; in the music industry with the rising fame of BTS; and more. Emoji representation is just the next step.
The bubble tea emoji proposal was submitted to the Unicode Consortium in September, 2018 by Timothy Deng, Sujay Khandekar, Ranjitha Kumar, Yiying Lu. After being passed up over and over, their hard work is finally being rewarded! We thank you all for your efforts.
It will take some time for Apple iOS, Google Android and other operating systems to release their versions of the emoji, but we're all very excited!
Update: Google has said that the new emoji will be coming to their platform later this year