*By Alisha Haridasani* Apparently the texting world was very contemplative this year. According to an online survey, the ‘Thinking Face’ emoji best describes 2018ーmaking it the winner of the Best Emoji of the Year in Emojipedia’s annual awards honoring World Emoji Day. The other honoree was the ‘Exploding Head,' which won for Best New Emoji. “These are put out to a popular vote, we put it out to the whole World Emoji Day network,” said Jeremy Burge, Chief Emoji Officer at Emojipedia. “This is the will of the people." Voting was open for two weeks and closed on Tuesday. Apple also marked World Emoji Day by revealing that dozens of new emojis will be added to iOS 12 later this year. Redheads, bald people, and people with graying hair are among Apple’s newcomersーpart of the company’s latest attempts to increase diversity and inclusion among its slate of emojis, said Burge. A peacock, a caped superhero, a cupcake, and the surprisingly popular mango were also added to iOS 12. “There are so many mango fans out there,” explained Burge. “Mango’s popular, trust me.” Apple integrated emojis onto its platform in 2012, catalyzing significant growth in usage, said Burge. In the years since, emojis have rapidly become universal symbols for laughter, love, anger...and whatever the folded hands mean. There are currently almost 3,000 emojis approved by encoding organization Unicode, and most of them ー around 2,300 ー are used daily. According to data released by Facebook last week, over 900 million emoji-only messages are sent over the Messenger app every day. Emojis even shape our email habits: analytics company Leanplum reports emails with emojis are opened 66 percent more often than emails without the symbols. For the full segment, [click here.](https://cheddar.com/videos/winners-of-2018-emoji-awards-revealed)
