When did you, Spectator readers, last send an emoji in a text, DM or, gasp, email? I’ve just looked through the last messages I’ve sent and I sent a weeping smiley face to my wife last night while we were discussing Colin Firth’s singing in the film of Mamma Mia! (To be honest, anyone who has suffered through Firth murdering “My Last Summer” might use considerably stronger emojis than that.) Yet as a 44-year-old man, I can also concede that my own usage of emojis in my written communications is not as prevalent as that as my 10-year-old daughter Rose, who is an ardent user of them whenever she gets hold of my or her mother’s telephone. Unsurprisingly, given both her age and sense of humor, the poop emoji 💩 tends to be her favorite, closely followed by the wilting rose 🥀.
The combination of the two is one that her generation – Generation Alpha, or so they’re now called – might well relish, given the way that emojis and acronyms are rapidly replacing conventional speech. A recent survey by the New York Times, that bastion of down-with-Gen-Z-journalism, revealed that last year’s fastest-rising emojis, in terms of usage, include everything from the wilted flower – to denote sorrow or heartbreak – to, somewhat bizarrely, a crude version of the Moai statue 🗿, which is used, whether sincerely or ironically, to depict stoicism in the face of difficulty. Yet the most popular, as usual, are variants on the laughing-crying face 😂 😹, which are particularly prevalent in messages being used by teenage girls on whatever platforms they choose to communicate in. Well, it beats sending nudes on Snapchat, anyway.
What is as interesting as the emojis that have gained in popularity, or have at least remained consistent, are those that have tumbled. Once, the skull emoji 💀, indicating that someone had died laughing – perhaps the inevitable result of one too many cry-laughter emojis – was in vogue, but since 2022 or so, it has rapidly declined in popularity. The armchair sociologist in me, noting that it peaked in usage around 2021 and 2022, wonders if its brief ubiquity was some kind of response, knowingly or otherwise, to the chaos wrought by Covid, and the way in which we came to accept mortality and death as part of everyday life, before determinedly deciding that the Covid era was over in around 2023, and deciding to ignore it thereafter. Last year, its usage in messages sent by teenagers was somewhere well below 5 percent, compared to the threefold use that it had been enjoying a few years before.
There are other signs of social change that emojis display, too. While the ubiquitous sexual symbols of the eggplant 🍆, the peach 🍑 and the soaring rocket ship 🚀 remain reasonably consistent, suggesting that even if the young are having less sex, they are at least talking about it the same way that they have always done, it is interesting to note that symbols such as the beer mug 🍺 (257th most used emoji in 2025, down 29 spots from the previous year) and the wine glass 🍷 (305th most used, down from 250 in 2024) are simply not having the same place in the lives of the young as they once did. And politics, too, do not have the same appeal that they once did. The Palestinian flag 🇵🇸 is now the 306th most used emoji, having declined precipitously from its near ubiquity in 2023. Even in 2024, it was still the 268th most used, but few would bet against it going down even further next year, as teenagers tune out of an increasingly prolonged and uncool conflict.
It is easy to mock Generation Z as superficial and image and status-obsessed, and their use of emojis as little more than a tool to signify fleeting feelings without any depth or attention to them. Yet they should not simply be dismissed altogether – they are, after all, the future of our society and our planet – and if their deepest concerns can be divined by a few smiley pixels on a keyboard, then we should pay these particular little faces more attention than we might have been doing for a considerable time before now.
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