Apple’s iOS 14.5 emoji promote inclusion, vaccines and AirPods Max

As part of iOS 14.5, Apple is adding a new emoji from the release of Emoji 13.1 from the Unicode Consortium, including skin tone options for some popular emojis and several new smiling faces and hearts. The company is also making some changes to other emojis that are already available.

The new changes in skin tone and gender presentation are probably the most important to note. Popular emoji like “Kissing couples” and “Couples with hearts” now have many more skin tone variations for all options.

Image: Emojipedia

In addition to more skin tones, the bearded emoji has also been adjusted to allow not only the neutral “Person: Beard”, but also “Man: Beard” and “Woman: Beard”.

Image: Emojipedia

The Apple update also includes his vision of the new smiley faces included in the newest set of emojis from the Unicode Consortium, including “Exhaling Face”, “Face with Spiral Eyes” and “Face in Clouds”. Hearts, another category of favorite emojis, also has two new members joining its ranks, “Heart on Fire” and “Mending Heart”.

Grid view

• 
  Exhaling face, face with spiraling eyes and face in the clouds.
  
  

  Image: Emojipedia
  

• 
  Heart on fire and mending the heart.
  
  

  Image: Emojipedia
  

All of these emojis were approved by the Unicode Consortium in September, which means that suppliers could start integrating them into their products and services at that time. But it is up to individual companies to design the appearance of emojis on their devices and services, which is why a smiley face on your iPhone looks different than on Twitter. Companies also decide when the new emoji will appear – Pixel users, for example, have been able to use the new emoji since December.

Apple is also making adjustments to some existing emojis: the climbing emoji will now have a helmet, the syringe emoji is now more generic, rather than full of blood, and the headphones look like AirPods Max.

Syringe exchange can be legitimately useful for anyone who writes about COVID-19. The new syringe is not only less intimidating when bloodless, but also more applicable to vaccines, which we hope will become much more common soon. Check out this comparison from Emojipedia:

Changing the emoji on the headphones to look like the AirPods Max, on the other hand, follows a known pattern: Apple regularly inserts its own products into its emoji set as a way of free product placement. (The Apple phone emoji looks a lot like an iPhone, for example.) If you want to see how different the new emoji from headphones is, Emojipedia made that comparison, also:

Apple claims that all of these emojis are available in the new version of iOS 14.5 beta, which also comes with a small change to the Apple Music app. According to Reddit users running the beta, you can now add and remove songs from your queue with the same type of swipe used in the Apple Mail app to archive, delete, or flag emails.

The full release of iOS 14.5 also includes several other useful additions, such as support for the new Xbox and PlayStation controls, the ability to set Siri’s standard music streaming service for Spotify, and the ability to unlock your phone with Apple Watch .

February 16 update, 8:30 pm ET: Added context about the new emoji and changes to older emojis in iOS 14.5.