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Date/Time: Tue Mar 03 03:48:29 PT 2026
ReportID: ID20260303034829
Name: Philippe Verdy
Report Type: Public Review Issue
Opt Subject: [U18.0a] U+1F98B and U+1FACC butterflies
Is there a way to really distinguish the already encoded U+1F98B BUTTERFLY, from the U+1FACC MONARCH BUTTERFLY proposed in Unicode 18.0 alpha public review draft? U+1F98B has existing variants already found in various Emoji fonts where the generic butterfly is undistinguishable from an effective monarch butterfly. Both are flying, both have their wheels deployed, they may be slightly tilted or not. I wonder if the new character should not be just a variant. Note that the draft chart does not even indicate that these two characters are related (and easily confusable).
Date/Time: Mon Mar 09 15:32:16 PT 2026
ReportID: ID20260309153216
Name: Logna Wishart-Craig
Report Type: Public Review Issue
Opt Subject: Squinting Face Emoji
Just wanted to express my support for the squinting face emoji being included in v18. I have nothing against the cracked face emoji, I believe we can coexist together, however, personally the squinting face emoji would see a fair bit more usage from me. Raised eyebrow face emoji gets me a good way there, but doesn't have the same playful energy. Thank you for your time and consideration.
Date/Time: Sat Mar 28 10:26:51 PT 2026
ReportID: ID20260328102651
Name: Charlotte Buff
Report Type: Public Review Issue
Opt Subject: PRI 537: Necessity of Monarch Butterfly
I recognise that protesting the inclusion of any emoji candidate is largely an exercise in futility these days, but nevertheless I want to state for the record that I find the rationale behind the encoding of U+1FACC MONARCH BUTTERFLY to be very dubious. The other emoji disunifications in the 18.0 repertoire – PICKLE from CUCUMBER, and METEOR from COMET – seem well justified to me. While these obviously represent strongly related concepts that can be hard to tell apart by appearance alone, culturally they play quite distinct roles and having these concepts share the same code points undoubtably leads to confusion and miscommunication. The case for MONARCH BUTTERFLY is much less apparent, if not downright inscrutable. To be frank, I do not believe the ESR’s claim that the observed glyphic variance of the existing U+1F98B BUTTERFLY represents an interoperability issue and that the addition of a second butterfly character is the best (or even a good) solution to that problem. I do not believe that “butterfly” and “one particular species of butterfly” are semantically different in any meaningful way, and that end users consider the former an insufficient substitute for the latter. Maybe that is a preposterous claim for me to make as I do not have access to the same research that the ESR is basing its decisions on, but what I do know from years of observation is that the ESR isn’t doing its reputation (and by extension the Unicode Consortium’s reputation) any favours by brazenly violating its own guidelines like this. And just to be clear, encoding MONARCH BUTTERFLY separately from BUTTERFLY *is* a violation of the official emoji proposal guidelines, namely exclusion factors 1 (already representable), 2 (overly specific), and 3 (open-ended). This is not the first time the ESR has chosen to overlook its own standards with, in my opinion, little to no justification. It’s not even the first time we got a colour variant of an already existing animal, but at least “a black cat” is something that people conceptualise as somewhat distinct from just “a cat”, with its own connotations and symbolic meanings that are simply not present were the colour of the cat left unspecified. If the same is true for monarch butterflies to a comparable degree then I must have been living under a rock my entire life. From an outsider perspective – and also from my own perspective, as someone who has been closely following and at times even actively engaged in the emoji encoding process for an entire decade now – the ESR’s decisions on which proposals to progress or decline each year appear highly arbitrary and unmotivated. This is not an uncommon opinion in my experience, and it’s only gotten more common over time. I used to be able to tell people dissatisfied with the rejection of their dream emoji that Unicode follows an organised process with concrete rules for evaluating proposals, that they can’t just add any random junk solely because someone was asking for it, that there’s no point encoding obscure or overly specific emoji that nobody is going to use – but I can’t do that anymore. Not with a straight face, anyway. If the emoji proposal guidelines that every hopeful submitter is required to adhere to actually applied in practice, we probably wouldn’t have ended up with such showstoppers as U+1F6D8 LANDSLIDE, and most certainly MONARCH BUTTERFLY would never have made the shortlist in the first place. Naturally I would prefer for MONARCH BUTTERFLY to be shelved indefinitely, but at the very least I would like to ask for it to be removed from the Unicode 18.0 alpha repertoire and postponed for further research. If APPLE CORE and SQUINTING FACE were somehow so controversial that it justified expunging them at the eleventh hour then surely the world can survive another year without a second, slightly different butterfly emoji to make sure one is actually needed.