We have submitted a proposal for a new emoji to Unicode: The Winking with Thermometer Face – an absolute need, as data shows.
Social media is used to share information about health and wellbeing as well as suffering and sickness. The FACE WITH THERMOMETER 🤒 emoji is of great use in this respect. The question remains though whether being “ill“ on social media always means being actually ill.
We retrieved German data from Instagram and noticed a telling pattern. Medically illness should occur equally often on all days of the week. But the hashtag #krank (a specific German term for being ill, predominately used to share images of being in bed) shows an unexpected trend:
There could be a number of reasons why people tend to be ill more often after the weekend than on weekends. But the most obvious one is that a lot of users are not actually ill but “ill“.
When taking Sunday illness as a reference for actual illness, as much as 25,5 % of all communicated illness would be non-actual illness. Or to put it another way: FACE WITH THERMOMETER is probably used inadequately one in four times. This shows a clear need for an emoji which communicates being “ill“ rather than real illness.
Proposed Emoji
We propose to simply create an emoji as a ZWJ sequence of FACE WITH THERMOMETER 🤒 [U+1F912] + WINKING FACE 😉 [U+1F609] (therefore there is not even a necessity to encode new characters):
WINKING WITH THERMOMETER FACE
Design by Ole Häntzschel
We got a reply from Unicode that they are refining their process about suggesting ZWJ sequences and that we can re-submit our suggestion once they have announced this new process. We will of course ;-)
Tin Fischer 