Redheads, female police officers, and pedestrians of all skin tones, rejoice! Facebook has begun to roll out more than 1,500 new Facebook Messenger emojis to add a whole new inclusive dimension of emotion to your digital chat experience with friends. The addition of new emojis seems to be one of those rare instances where Facebook users aren't up in arms over the new change, but a lot of them aren't sure where or how to find all the new emoji options. But fret not: Here's how to use the new Facebook emojis no matter what kind of device you're using to access Facebook Messenger.
First of all, can we take a second to talk about how freaking awesome these new emojis are? In an announcement posted to its Facebook Messenger page on Wednesday, Facebook said it saw a need to roll out 1,500-plus new emojis since those currently out there aren't "living up to the gender and skin tone diversity that we see in our world everyday." With a wider variety of gender-agnostic designs as well as gender-inclusive designs, Facebook has taken a powerful "non-verbal" stance through the emoji medium found in 10 percent of all mobile sends, according to Facebook.
Accessing all these new emojis is actually pretty easy, but does take a little getting used to. According to Facebook, users can find the new emojis in their Facebook Messenger app. This is important, because, as of Thursday morning, it does not appear that the new emojis are available under the Facebook Messages section when using the web version of the site in your browser. Remember: Facebook Messages does not equal Facebook Messenger.
You can find the new emoji picker in your Facebook Messenger app just under the composer field where it says "Type a message..." — the emoji picker icon will be all the way to the left. Tap the emoji picker icon and voilà! You're on your way to finding the perfect emoji to insert into your conversation. Facebook also said "it's now easier than ever to toggle in between the regular text keyboard and the emoji keyboard," which is particularly helpful if you're a total emoji addict like I am. Here's the new emoji picker in action as seen in Facebook's announcement video:
If you're still not seeing the emoji picker option, you're not alone. Several users have commented on the Facebook Messenger emoji announcement post to say that they've updated to the latest version of the app, but still aren't seeing the emoji picker icon. I tried logging out of Facebook Messenger and back in again to see if that made a difference, but no dice. I even deleted and reinstalled the Facebook Messenger app on my iPhone 6s, but still no luck.
Facebook hasn't said anything official as to why some users still don't yet have access beyond "The new emojis will be globally available starting June 2nd" and that "these new emojis will be available on web, iOS and Android" in two different comments replying to user complaints. To be fair, there are 1.09 billion daily active users as of March 2016, so it's no surprise that perhaps not every one of us has gotten the new emoji picker just yet.
