I’m traveling to China for work for the first time, which has meant getting on board with WeChat, which I haven’t needed to use before. This has suddenly opened up the world of WeChat’s custom emoji list to me, above and beyond the regular emoji options built into the best iPhones and the best Android phones, and there are some real good ones in there.
There are a bunch that I instantly wish I could use in all my WhatsApp and iMesssage chats – though the good news is that you can add any emoji you want to Slack, so I actually can make use of these options professionally. Now, one might question whether I should use these professionally, but we can only play the hand we’re dealt.
Something that often comes up with emoji symbols is that our interpretation of them often varies not only from what their original intention was to how we use them now, but they’re also open to different interpretation and meaning in different cultures. I enjoyed reading this page about the culturally specific use of WeChat’s emojis in China, why they’re needed for greater nuance of expression – which then serves as a thoughtful jumping off about why emojis are so popular everywhere.
So here are the eight emojis I most want to see ported from WeChat to the general Android and iPhone emoji library, and how I’ll twist them to my own dark purposes.