What are we going to do with this emoji in the clouds?

Apple’s interpretation of the new Unicode emojis for 2021 is generally very good. With one exception: your head in the clouds. Or the smoke.

In September 2020, the Unicode consortium which takes care, among other things, to create the new emojis, released a short list of new emotions that sounded very 2020. The breath of fatigue after 7 hours of meeting on Zoom and the face stunned by almost a year of confinement rubbed shoulders with a broken heart (by a rupture due to cohabitation in a studio). Among these symbols of a very difficult year, an emoji was surprising: but what does this head in a wave of smoke correspond to?

How will you use an unclear emoji?

The Unicode consortium is not the clearest, naming the head “Face in the Clouds”. Emojipedia, reference on the subject, does not help the reader: troubled mind, deep confusion or … inner peace. In other words, everything and its opposite. It was hoped that builders and other social networks that embrace the overly formal definitions of the consortium would provide an answer. With the new beta of iOS 14.5 released on February 16, 2021 and incorporating the new emojis, Apple is formal: get by.

How to describe this emoji? Already, the clouds are more like fog or smoke – which tends to steer us away from overly positive interpretations of this new boil. But above all, Apple has adopted a strange pseudorealism, where the face is framed in a smoke with behavior at the very least surprising. Why did you leave an opening at eye level, for example, by closing it on the right, but not on the left? How can an air flow passing through billows of smoke have this shape? Is there a character to the left of the emoji blowing in the fog without altering the position of the top of the mace cloudy ?

Whatever the answers to these questions, the interpretation of this Face in Clouds remixed by the Cupertino illustrators doesn’t give us a clue as to its possible use – unless you end up in a fire that cleverly leaves room for the eyes to use your cell phone to call for help.

This anomaly in the world of emojis is all the more astonishing as the work of Apple, like that of the biggest brands, has always been turned towards a triple objective: to offer more emotions to share, in the most inclusive way. and diverse as possible, while paying attention to the legibility (or accuracy) of the drawings sent. In the shadows, teams of scientists and crop specialists represented work on emojis – and Memojis at Apple – with teams dedicated to illustration responsible for materializing this knowledge. Sometimes oscillating between truth and accessibility: Typically, the shark Memoji that can stick out its tongue is not a scientific representation of a shark, but a fun take on the sea animal – which doesn’t have a tongue like that found in most mammals. Apple decided in favor of fun rather than science.

And alongside our incomprehensible cloudy face, Apple, for example, is rolling out couples of all genres in user-selectable skin colors, a fix to the climber emoji to add a safety helmet and an update to Memojis. to add many masks. So many examples that respond to the same philosophy behind this imperfect form of communication, but oh so important in our digital daily life. A philosophy that the mysterious face in the clouds escapes.