Here’s the deal with emoji. There’s an all-powerful governing body called the Unicode Consortium that decides what emoji you get on your phone and what emoji you, well, don’t. But once Unicode decides, it’s up to your platform holder to decide how the emoji will render on a given device. Which is why the gun emoji looks like a plastic squirt gun on Apple products, but like a pistol on Microsoft ones. This week, Google announced that it was tweaking how it renders the salad emoji. While previously the salad included a visible slice of a hard-boiled egg, the new version is egg-free. Instead, it’s just a bowl of veggies. Which means the salad emoji is now vegan, as pointed out by Google UX manager Jennifer Daniel on Twitter.
For the record, she was making a joke. The real reason for the change was to better align the emoji with what Unicode had in mind for the salad. Still, that didn’t stop certain Twitter types from weighing in on the egg removal — because it’s Twitter and if there’s something to be mad about, you’ll be able to find somebody who is mad about it.
Guys, there is already an egg emoji on your phone. If you’re really that desperate to text your friends about that Cobb salad you ate … just use that.
