Proposed Pinch Emoji adds a touch of quirk
New pinch emoji proposal will allow users to express a small amount of something with new hand gesture.
Proposed design of the pinch emoji
(credit: Christopher Beamont)
A new pinch emoji has been proposed to the Unicode Consortium, giving users the chance to express a small amount of something
Jenny Kortina and Christopher Beamont submitted the new hand gesture citing that there wasn’t a current way to express a tiny amount of something. The emoji could also be entitled the pinch hand gesture if successful.
Pinch Emoji Likelihood
In the filing, the pair demonstrate the vast sequencing potential of the emoji with 12 other symbols. A face mask and the pinch emoji for example would signify that you are “kind of sick”, while the pinch emoji and a money bag would show that you have a “little bit of money”.
The image design created by Mr Beamont shows a hand with the index finger and the thumb almost squeezed together, indicating that there is something very small between the two digits. The proposed emoji would also support skin tone modifiers, much like the other hand gesture emojis.
Later into the document, search results are compared - with the proposers opting to compare the word pinch with the term “thumbs down”. While search engine and Youtube results showing that the phrase “thumbs down” outperforms the word pinch, trend data is much more promising - showing pinch to be the overall winner.
A Pinch of Class?
Not already representable by any current emojis and highly robust, the pinch symbol does not feature any major exclusion factors.
If successful, the pinch emoji would join the body category of emojis and join 30 existing hand gesture emojis including the thumbs up and the ok hand.
Other new emojis currently being mulled over by the Unicode Consortium include several animals (skunk, otter), food items (butter) and even dancing activities (ballet).
