The peach emoji as it appears on Twitter

The Peach emoji (🍑) is a fruit emoji featuring a pinkish-orange peach. The emoji is noted for its resemblance to buttocks and is consequently frequently used as a euphemism for such on social media.

Development and usage history

The peach emoji was originally included in proprietary emoji sets from au by KDDI.[1] As part of a set of characters sourced from SoftBank Mobile, au by KDDI, and NTT Docomo emoji sets, the peach emoji was approved as part of Unicode 6.0 in 2010.[2] Global popularity of emojis then surged in the early to mid-2010s.[3] The peach emoji has been included in the Unicode Technical Standard for emoji (UTS #51) since its first edition (Emoji 1.0) in 2015.[2]

Character information
Preview 🍑
Unicode name PEACH
Encodings decimal hex
Unicode 127825 U+1F351
UTF-8 240 159 141 145 F0 9F 8D 91
UTF-16 55356 57169 D83C DF51
GB 18030 148 57 183 57 94 39 B7 39
Numeric character reference 🍑 🍑
Shift JIS (au by KDDI)[4] 243 250 F3 FA
7-bit JIS (au by KDDI)[1] 122 124 7A 7C
Emoji shortcode[5] :peach:
Google name (pre-Unicode)[6] PEACH
CLDR text-to-speech name[7] peach
Google substitute string[6] [モモ]

Popularity on social media and cultural impact

The peach emoji is commonly used to represent buttocks or even female genitalia in sexting conversations.[8][9][10] This usage has been noted to be common in the United States.[11]

In line with the peach emoji's common usage in sexual contexts, Emojipedia noted that the emoji is popularly paired with the eggplant emoji (🍆), which is often used to represent a penis.[12]

During the impeachment proceedings against President Trump in 2019, the peach emoji was used to render "impeachment" as "im🍑ment" by Trump opposers.[13][14][15] The Christian Science Monitor noted that "peach" and "impeachment" are not etymologically related.[16]

Reception

In 2015, Vice claimed that the peach emoji is a "leading contender" for a vulva emoji.[17] In 2021, The Verge stated that peach emoji joined together with new bubbles emoji will be "great",[18] while Cosmopolitan ranked the peach emoji as the 11th "horniest emoji".[19]

In 2016, Apple Inc. brought back the peach emoji and attempted to redesign the emoji to less resemble buttocks;[20] later some fans praised the emoji's comeback,[21] but this was mostly met with fierce backlash in beta testing and Apple reversed its decision by the time it went live to the public.[22][23] In April 2019, Facebook and Instagram both banned using the eggplant or peach emojis alongside sexual statements about "being horny".[24]

References

  1. ^ a b Scherer, Markus; Davis, Mark; Momoi, Kat; Tong, Darick; Kida, Yasuo; Edberg, Peter. "Emoji Symbols: Background Data—Background data for Proposal for Encoding Emoji Symbols" (PDF). UTC L2/10-132.
  2. ^ a b "🍑 Peach". Emojipedia. Retrieved December 23, 2021.
  3. ^ "Oxford Dictionaries Word of the Year 2015 is…". Oxford Dictionaries Blog. November 16, 2015. Archived from the original on July 10, 2017. Retrieved July 28, 2017.
  4. ^ Unicode Consortium. "Emoji Sources". Unicode Character Database. Archived from the original on 2020-04-28. Retrieved 2020-04-24.
  5. ^ JoyPixels. "Emoji Alpha Codes". Emoji Toolkit.
  6. ^ a b Android Open Source Project (2009). "GMoji Raw". Skia Emoji.
  7. ^ Unicode, Inc. "Annotations". Common Locale Data Repository.
  8. ^ Schwedel, Heather (September 26, 2019). "Does the Peach Emoji Still Mean Butt, or Is It a Rallying Cry for Democracy?". Slate Magazine.
  9. ^ "A beginner's guide to sexting with emoji". The Daily Dot. December 27, 2016.
  10. ^ Nazim, Hafeezah. "It's Confirmed: The Eggplant Emoji Symbolizes A Penis". Nylon.
  11. ^ Bromwich, Jonah Engel (October 21, 2015). "How Emojis Find Their Way to Phones". The New York Times. Retrieved March 17, 2019.
  12. ^ Kircher, Madison Malone (December 16, 2016). "Very Official Study Finds Peach Emoji Most Often Paired With Eggplant". Intelligencer. Retrieved March 18, 2019.
  13. ^ "How Are You Supposed To Use The Peach Emoji 🍑?". Dictionary.com.
  14. ^ Guardian Staff (October 2, 2019). "Peachy: the emoji that's become a political statement". the Guardian.
  15. ^ "How the sexy peach emoji joined the resistance". The Washington Times. Retrieved 24 December 2021.
  16. ^ "'Impeachment' has nothing to do with fruit". Christian Science Monitor. October 31, 2019.
  17. ^ "What's the Best Vagina Emoji?". www.vice.com.
  18. ^ Porter, Jon (September 15, 2021). "There's a new bubbles emoji that'll go just great with the peach". The Verge.
  19. ^ Hsieh, Carina; Smothers, Hannah; Varina, Rachel (August 11, 2021). "Yes, There's Such a Thing as Horny Emojis, and Yes, We're Going to Break Them Down for You". Cosmopolitan.
  20. ^ "Apple brings back the peach butt emoji". TechCrunch. 15 November 2016.
  21. ^ "The Peach Emoji Butt Is Back And Fans Couldn't Be Any Happier". Complex.
  22. ^ "Everything's peachy as Apple restores emoji's 'bum' features". the Guardian. November 16, 2016.
  23. ^ "Here's Why People Are Upset About the New Emoji Update". Complex.
  24. ^ "'Sexual' use of eggplant and peach emojis banned on Facebook, Instagram". October 29, 2019.
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