The Eggplant emoji (🍆), also known by its Unicode name of Aubergine, is an emoji featuring a purple eggplant. Social media users have noted the emoji's phallic appearance and often use it as a euphemistic or suggestive icon during sexting conversations, to represent a penis. It is frequently paired and often contrasted with the peach emoji (🍑), representing the buttocks (or vulva).
The eggplant emoji was originally included in proprietary emoji sets from SoftBank Mobile and au by KDDI.[1] When Apple released the first iPhone in 2007, there was an emoji keyboard intended for Japanese users only,[2] which encoded them using SoftBank's Private Use Area scheme.[3] However, after iPhone users in the United States discovered that downloading Japanese apps allowed access to the keyboard, pressure grew to expand the availability of the emoji keyboard beyond Japan.[2]
As part of a set of characters sourced from SoftBank, au by KDDI, and NTT Docomo emoji sets, the eggplant emoji was approved as part of Unicode 6.0 in 2010 under the name "Aubergine".[4] In 2011, Apple made the emoji keyboard a standard iOS feature worldwide.[2] Global popularity of emojis then surged in the early to mid-2010s.[5] The eggplant emoji has been included in the Unicode Technical Standard for emoji (UTS #51) since its first edition (Emoji 1.0) in 2015.[4]
Preview | 🍆 | |
---|---|---|
Unicode name | AUBERGINE | |
Encodings | decimal | hex |
Unicode | 127814 | U+1F346 |
UTF-8 | 240 159 141 134 | F0 9F 8D 86 |
UTF-16 | 55356 57158 | D83C DF46 |
GB 18030 | 148 57 182 56 | 94 39 B6 38 |
Numeric character reference | 🍆 |
🍆 |
Shift JIS (au by KDDI)[6] | 243 144 | F3 90 |
Shift JIS (SoftBank 3G)[6] | 249 234 | F9 EA |
7-bit JIS (au by KDDI)[1] | 121 112 | 79 70 |
Emoji shortcode[7] | :eggplant: | |
Google name (pre-Unicode)[8] | EGGPLANT | |
CLDR text-to-speech name[9] | eggplant | |
Google substitute string[8] | [ナス] |
The "aubergine" or "eggplant" emoji is commonly used to represent a penis in sexting conversations.[10][11] This usage has been noted to be common, particularly in the United States,[12][13] as well as in Canada.[14] In line with the eggplant emoji's common usage in sexual contexts, Emojipedia noted that the emoji is popularly paired with the peach emoji (🍑), which is often used to represent buttocks[15] or female genitalia.[16]
The emoji was used as a reference to penis on Twitter as early as 2011.[10][17] By the mid-2010s, online magazine outlets wrote about how the emoji's usage in sexual contexts morphed society's connotations of the eggplant "from an innocuous vegetable to America's favorite shorthand for a throbbing cock."[14][18] Slate writer Amanda Hess stated that "the eggplant has risen to become America's dominant phallic fruit."[13] Writing for Cosmopolitan, Kathryn Lindsay stated that "this simple, previously neglected vegetable rocketed into stardom in a matter of years, thanks to our collective decision to deem it the universal symbol for dick."[18]
In 2018, Dictionary.com became the first major reference to add explanations for emojis,[16] although these explanations are only included on the editorial section of the website.[19]
The eggplant emoji has been referenced by popular culture numerous times. In 2017, Netflix won a bidding war to distribute a film titled The Eggplant Emoji.[20] The film was ultimately renamed The Package. In 2019, the cosmetics retailer Lush sold bath bombs resembling the eggplant emoji for Valentine's Day.[21] The company expanded their eggplant and peach emoji-themed product line the following year.[22]
As early as 2013, online media outlets have commented on the eggplant emoji's resemblance to a penis, with Complex listing it as one of "10 emojis to send while sexting."[23]
In April 2015, Instagram released a feature allowing users to hashtag emojis.[24] Shortly after, the platform banned the hashtag "🍆", as well as any references to "eggplant" from its search function.[24][25] Later in 2019, Facebook and Instagram both banned using the eggplant or peach emojis alongside "sexual statements about being horny."[26]
In 2016, the eggplant emoji's widespread usage as sexual innuendo led the American Dialect Society to vote it as the "Most Notable Emoji" of 2015.[10][27]