Of the six billion emoji that are sent globally every day, around 70% are emotion based – for example, smiley face, love hearts. A smaller proportion of the emoji sent are sad expressions.

By chaining the selectors together, he was able to encode invisible messages inside an emoji (or any other Unicode character) ...

But he still predicts old favourites such as the smiling face, crying laughing and red heart emojis will remain popular for 2025. Keith, who is editor of emoji website Emojipedia, said ...