TikTok's hidden emojis: all the codes and how to activate them

A brief review of the history of emojis

Emojis are a fundamental part of written communication on the Internet. Although we now have icon keyboards integrated into our mobile devices —and even into our desktop operating systems—, their origin dates back to the late 1990s. Emojis are based on ’emoticons’, faces that the first Internet users designed using normal and ordinary characters. In 1999 , Japanese designer Shigetaka Kurita created the first 176 emojis. There is an earlier case of some 90 monochrome drawings being added to a Pioneer phone (the J-Phone DP-211), but its designer remained anonymous and the phone was a commercial failure.

Going back to Kurita, he is credited with creating the first emojis . They had a resolution of 12 by 12 pixels and could be used by customers of the mobile operator NTT. For years, emojis were a feature unique to Japan. Meanwhile, in the Western world, there were other variants that were shared by networks such as Microsoft Messenger, but they were not standardized. And it is that what makes emojis emojis is their standardization .

Emojis and smartphones, an inseparable union

Nearly a decade later, emojis made their way to the iPhone with iOS 5 under the Unicode standard . The deployment of these icons was a complete success, and it did not take long for them to reach Android mobiles and the rest of Internet communication platforms. Today, speaking without emojis on the Internet is almost something that can offend us. Normally, when we communicate in written form, we lose our tone. A message from the most everyday can sound harsh and even rude as it lacks the tone with which we would speak in person. That kindness of words is what we have delegated to emojis. Thanks to them, we can have a little more pleasant conversations and we can dilute a little the lack of that communicative element so present in speech. At the end of the day, text messages are nothing more than “oral communication in written format”.

Part of the beauty of emoji is that each mobile phone manufacturer or messaging application can create its own set of custom icons . When you send an emoji, you’re not really sending the pixels, but a code within the Unicode spectrum. For example, if you send a smiley face emoji, you are actually sending the code ‘U+1F60x 0’. In each app it will be reproduced with a different image based on the design of the emoji that have been previously created.

Did you know that TikTok has 46 secret emojis?

They are known as the ‘secret TikTok emojis’. However, they are not sent in the same way that we usually send emojis in apps like Instagram, Whatsapp or Telegram. To use them, you have to use a series of shortcuts , so they are not so easy to insert into conversations.

This set of icons is exclusive to TikTok , and was released as an easter egg of sorts. In order to send them, the user needs to know the code that generates them. They are written in square brackets, which is not very practical, by the way. If you go crazy looking for the bracket , on most keyboards it is found by pressing the ‘123’ key and then the second key that displays more special characters, just above the ‘abc’ key.

The moment you type the closing bracket, the secret emoji will appear on your screen. Unlike other icon sets, there are no differences in these icons whether you use the TikTok app on iOS or Android. The codes are also static and have no translation. Therefore, if you want to use them, you will have to learn the words in English.