World Emoji Day is celebrated on July 17 every year and part of this day’s significance is the announcement of emoji-related news and releases. Among them is the emoji award list, and the most anticipated emoji of 2022 has already been announced. 

In 2022 the pink heart won the most anticipated emoji award, with almost 40% of the votes. 

In second place is the shaking head and the light blue heart is in the third spot. As per the World Emoji Awards, which is in charge of overseeing such proceedings, there were “hundreds and hundreds of votes”. 

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One user commented on their Twitter post, “FINALLY a pink heart, a light blue heart and a grey heart! More coloured hearts please and a raspberry emoji and also a cola and cotton candy etc! Would be awesome”. 

In 2021, it was the melting face which walked away with the top prize, where the eye and mouth slip down the face while maintaining a distorted smile. This quality often leads this emoji to be associated with sarcasm. 

While this emoji can be used to talk about extreme heat, it is also used to communicate embarrassment, shame, or a slow sinking feeling of dread. 

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Starting out, there were only 176 emojis, but the collection has now considerably grown to 3,633 emojis. More are expected to be added through 2022, and the pink heart is one of them. For now, the red heart remains one of the most popular and is usually an expression of romance or love. 

Emojis have been around a long time, but it is only after the Unicode standardization that they started gaining even greater popularity outside Japan. Shigetaka Kurita is the man credited with fathering the modern-day emojis but it is Jeremy Burge’s brainchild Emojipedia that now logs most information about emojis and Burge is the man behind the World Emoji Day as well as the awards given out on the said day.