Report reveals uptick in creativity among users, with growing popularity of emoji stories, emoji text art, and emoji with special symbols ahead of World Emoji Day on July 17

Facemoji Keyboard published its State of Emoji Report 2022, revealing the most popular emoji of the year, based on global usage. The report also features a closer look at new, exciting ways of using emoji, including emoji stories, text art and the functionality to combine emoji with special symbols.

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Key findings about emoji usage include:

• The Face with Tears of Joy and Rolling on the Floor Laughing ranked #1 and #2, respectively—neither budged from their place on last year’s report.
• Emerging as the only new superstar from Unicode 13.0, the Smiling Face with Tear landed a spot in the top 20.
• The Skull Face ranked among the top five for both the U.S. and the UK, with global usage spiking 250%. This is likely due to the popularity of exaggerated uses of the word “dead,” like “I’m dying laughing.”
• Breaking into the top 12 emoji across Indonesia, Russia, and the UK, the Moyai saw a usage spike of 130%.
• Earning the title of “trendiest” countries, Indonesia and Russia were the only two to feature emoji from Unicode 14.0 in their top 12.
• You could say great apps think alike—Instagram and Snapchat featured the same top five emoji, including the Face with Tears, the Loudly Crying Face, the Red Heart, the Rolling on the Floor Laughing, and the Pleading Face.
• Throughout the year, Facemoji users utilized emoji to celebrate certain holidays, including sending the Rose the most on Valentine’s Day, the Folded Hands the most on Eid al-Fitr, and New Year’s Day saw major usage spikes for the Sparkles, the Two Hearts, and the Sparkling Heart.

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When emoji became commonplace in messaging, the more creative users started looking for new avenues to have a bit of fun. Facemoji identified the following new trends:

• Emoji stories – Where users hold entire conversations using emoji, with minimal words but maximum expression and storytelling.
• Emoji with special symbols – Younger demographics on TikTok are joining the trend of overlaying emoji with triangles and rectangles.
• Emoji text art – Using multiple colored emoji to form an image, emoji text art is popular among younger demographics on social media.

“As digital and cultural phenomena, emoji are engrained in the way we message—now and as we look toward the future,” said Natalia Lin, product lead at Facemoji Keyboard. “This year’s State of Emoji Report shows that users are looking for creative ways to use emoji. This inspires Facemoji Keyboard to develop more engaging and fun emoji-based content for users to send, making communication more joyful.”

The report references fully anonymized global data, including specific insights about emoji use in eight countries—Argentina, France, India, Indonesia, Mexico, Russia, the UK, and the U.S. The data captures the top emoji used worldwide by Facemoji Keyboard users on Android and iOS between June 1, 2021 and June 15, 2022, as well as top emoji used by country and by app—including Bumble, Facebook, Hinge, Instagram, Snapchat, TikTok, Tinder, Twitter, and WhatsApp.