A fun thing about the wide world of emoji is that while they are carefully selected — often to great debate — by a governing body known as the Unicode Consortium. Unicode decides which emoji make the cut with each new batch of pictographs, so these are the people who recently brought you the breastfeeding emoji, a pretzel, and a whole suite of fantasy characters. But once those are chosen, it’s up to each individual platform to decide how the emoji will render for users. Which means, the gun emoji looks like a real revolver on Microsoft devices, but appears as a lime-green squirt gun for Apple users. It also means that the drooling-face emoji, which on a Samsung device looks like a terrified face in such a state of shock that a littlest bit of spit — so faint, it would be hardly visible if you were to see it scrolling through your Twitter feed — has leaked from its mouth, looks a little more, uh, sexual on iOS. Something actress Jessica Chastain learned this week after tweeting said emoji while discussing Lady Bird and losing her virginity to a Dave Matthews Band song. (Who among us?)
Learn from Jessica. Choose your emoji wisely. Don’t make yourself “look like a pervert.”
