Your iPhone Is About to Get Eight New Emoji You Did Not Know You Needed

iOS 26.4 adds eight new emoji to your iPhone keyboard, including a Bigfoot-inspired hairy creature, an orca, and a trombone that brass players have been requesting for years. You will not need to install anything extra or dig through settings. Once iOS 26.4 drops publicly in late March, the new characters appear automatically on the emoji keyboard alongside 155 skin tone and gender variants.

But here is the part that caught my attention: Apple waited until the fourth developer beta to ship these designs. That delay means the final renderings are still fresh, and a few of them look genuinely different from what Google and Samsung shipped weeks ago.

While I appreciate that Apple follows the Unicode Consortium’s specifications closely, the company consistently adds its own visual personality to each character. The Distorted Face emoji is a good example. Where Google’s version looks like a lightly warped smiley, Apple’s take stretches the features into something that genuinely unsettles you for a second before you laugh. It is the kind of design decision that makes Apple’s emoji keyboard feel like it was illustrated by someone who cared about the joke, not just the spec sheet.

These eight new characters come from Unicode 17.0, which the Unicode Consortium finalized on September 9, 2025. The standard added 4,802 new characters total, but only seven brand-new emoji code points made the cut. The eighth, a gender-neutral Ballet Dancer, is technically a ZWJ (Zero Width Joiner) sequence that combines two existing characters: a person and ballet shoes. If that distinction sounds academic, it matters for one practical reason. ZWJ sequences sometimes render as two separate emoji on older devices that have not updated. So if you send the Ballet Dancer to someone still running iOS 26.3, they might see a person emoji next to a ballet shoe emoji instead of the combined design.

Here is every new emoji arriving in iOS 26.4, along with what makes each one worth knowing about.

Distorted Face

This is the one I expect to see everywhere within a week of the public release. Apple’s design warps the standard smiley into a funhouse-mirror expression with bulging eyes and a stretched mouth. It conveys that specific brand of overwhelm where you are too exhausted to be upset and too amused to be serious. Think of it as the spiritual successor to the Melting Face from a few years back, except this one leans harder into confusion than resignation. The Unicode code point is U+1FAEA.

Hairy Creature

Inspired by Bigfoot, the Yeti, and cryptid folklore from dozens of cultures, this emoji depicts a large, humanoid, hairy figure. Apple’s version gives it a slightly cartoonish posture with brown fur and wide eyes that suggest curiosity rather than menace. I think it will get a lot of use in group chats when someone does something inexplicable, which is to say constantly. The code point is U+1FAC8.

Orca

Marine biologists and whale enthusiasts have been asking for a killer whale emoji for years, and it is finally here. Apple’s orca design is detailed enough to distinguish it from the existing whale emoji, with the characteristic black-and-white patterning clearly visible even at small sizes. The code point is U+1FACD, and it fills a genuinely noticeable gap in the animal category.

Trombone

The trombone is the first new musical instrument emoji since the banjo arrived back in 2019. Apple’s rendering shows a brass instrument with a gold body and silver slide mechanism. Beyond the obvious use in music conversations, I suspect this one will become shorthand for the comedic “wah-wah” sound effect. The code point is U+1FA8A.

Treasure Chest

A wooden chest with gold clasps and an open lid revealing coins and jewels. Apple went with a design that reads clearly even at text-message size, which is not easy when you are cramming that much detail into a 20-pixel square. The code point is U+1FA8E, and this one is going to dominate gaming group chats.

Landslide

This emoji depicts falling rocks and debris, representing a geological event. Apple’s version shows brown and gray rocks tumbling down a slope with dust clouds. While it has an obvious literal use for discussing natural disasters, I find it more interesting as a metaphor. “That meeting was a landslide” says something that no existing emoji could. The code point is U+1F6D8.

Fight Cloud

Straight out of a comic book, this emoji shows the cartoon dust cloud that appears when characters are brawling off-panel. Apple’s design is playful, with motion lines and small impact stars around a puffy white cloud. It communicates conflict without any graphic imagery, which makes it surprisingly versatile for everything from sports arguments to sibling rivalries. The code point is U+1FAEF.

Ballet Dancer

The only ZWJ sequence in this batch, the Ballet Dancer combines a person with ballet shoes to create a gender-neutral dancer in a classic pose. Unlike the existing Woman Dancing emoji, this one does not carry an assumed gender, and it supports all six skin tone modifiers. That makes it 7 total variants from a single concept, which is why the overall count for this update reaches 163 new emoji designs when you add up every skin tone combination across the Ballet Dancer, the newly supported skin tones for People Wrestling, and the People With Bunny Ears.

How to find the new emoji on your iPhone

Once you update to iOS 26.4, the new emoji appear in their respective categories on the emoji keyboard. The Distorted Face and Fight Cloud land in the Smileys and People section. The Orca joins Animals and Nature. The Trombone and Treasure Chest go to Objects. The Landslide appears in Travel and Places.

You can also search for them directly. Tap the emoji keyboard icon, then tap the search field at the top and type a keyword like “orca” or “trombone.” Apple’s emoji search in iOS 26 has gotten noticeably better at matching synonyms, so searching for “whale” should surface the Orca, and “Bigfoot” should find the Hairy Creature.

Keep in mind that if you send these emoji to someone who has not updated, the characters will either appear as blank squares or fall back to text representations depending on the recipient’s device and OS version. Cross-platform compatibility with Android devices running the latest emoji fonts should work without issues, since both platforms implement the same Unicode 17.0 standard.

iOS 26.4 also brings a wave of changes beyond the emoji keyboard. The same update that introduces the new characters overhauls the CarPlay dashboard with AI-powered features, improved battery charge limit controls through the Shortcuts app, and more. For a complete rundown of what else is new, check out every iOS 26.4 beta feature that deserves your attention. If you are running the beta already, the emoji landed specifically in Beta 4, released on March 9, 2026. Developers can browse them now, while everyone else should see the public release by the end of March.

One thing that is conspicuously absent from this batch: the Apple Core emoji. It appeared on early Unicode 17.0 draft lists throughout 2024, which led several publications to report it as confirmed. The Unicode Consortium ultimately withdrew it before finalization, and it did not resurface in the Unicode 18.0 draft either. If you were holding out for an apple core to complement the existing red apple emoji, that wait continues indefinitely.

I think the Distorted Face is going to be the breakout hit from this batch. It fills an emotional gap that existing face emoji do not cover, and Apple’s design is distinct enough to stop your thumb while scrolling. The Orca and Hairy Creature will have loyal fanbases, and the Trombone has meme potential that no one is pricing in yet. Whether you care about emoji expressiveness or just want to be the first person in your group chat to drop a Bigfoot, updating to iOS 26.4 the day it arrives is the move.