'Tiny penis' and 'period blood' emojis set to hit smartphones and the internet is going crazy

Emojis have been a part of pop culture since they landed on our cells phones in 2014 and in the last few years that have passed since then, there have been significant updates. Most recently, Unicode announced the 2019 Emoji List and the update to our keyboards include 230 new texting symbols.

Included in the new list is an emoji of pinching fingers, which is a gesture that Twitter users say represents a small penis, and a bright red drop of blood, which netizens are now going to use to represent the menstrual cycle.

Unicode Consortium, the group that helps make the open standards which allow people to use computers across the globe, announced on February 5 that the new emoji group will be available on phones later this year. According to Emojipedia, the updates will start happening in April and will continue till the end of the year.

The pinching hand emoji, popularly known as the small penis or tiny penis emoji, will come with adjustable skin tones and is probably going to take over group texts and Tinder accounts all over the world. The skin tone support was added to the Unicode Standard back in 2015 and has managed to increase the representation of women in 2016. Gender inclusivity became the rage in 2017 and new hair colors were finally added for the emojis in 2018.

The highly detailed drop of blood emoji came after a campaign that was led by Plan International UK which saw more than 55,000 people asking for a period emoji to be added to the global emoji keyboard. The charity is hoping that the new emoji will help break down all the stigma that surrounds menstruation.

Twitter has become the social media site for many new texting options and users have been giving their opinions on the new emojis all day. Referring to the pinching hand emoji, one user wrote: "Finally an emoji to describe the size of my attention span." Another asked, "why?" when the period emoji was announced, in reply to which a third user wrote: "The real question is why not? period blood is the best emoji ever!"

The new update marks the sixth major one since 2014 and this has taken the total count of all emojis up to 3,053. The update has also added more than a dozen emojis that represent deaf and blind communities as well as specially-abled people.

✨Unicode Emoji 12.0 — Final for 2019✨
What do mechanical arms, people holding hands, otters, and waffles have in common? They’re all part of Unicode 12.0!https://t.co/L1kohHSZfZ#Unicode #Emoji pic.twitter.com/UVwC45fhGe

— The Unicode Consortium (@unicode) February 5, 2019

The emojis, which were proposed by Apple last year, include people in manual and mechanized wheelchairs, prosthetic limbs, and service dogs. Apple collaborated with organizations such as the American Council of the Blind, the Cerebral Palsy Foundation and the National Association of the Deaf to come up with the new emojis.