Everybody loves sending emoji inline in their text, but the focus on the Unicode Consortium as the governor of emoji is misguided. The Unicode Technical Committee’s core competency was in assembling a bunch of independent text-encoding schemes (for English, Arabic, Chinese, Devanagari…) into one character set. But now we are asking the same committee to make decisions for the world about the universality of take-out boxes and tacos, or whether a Brontosaurus is a real dinosaur. No committee is qualified to do this. Asking Unicode to make a decision on each individual proposed emoji is silly, and there is no need to put every emoji on a single numbered list anyway. Many systems already support emoji the “right way,” which is to say, they are independent of Unicode and they make sure that emoji appear the same way to the sender and receiver. If you’re building a communications system or app, be like the ones who get this right: Slack, Zulip, Blogger, or anything that allows HTML inline images.