With its buck teeth, does the “nerd” emoji discriminate against people who wear glasses? People are protesting about the design of this character which maintains clichés about geeks. Google and Meta have already abandoned it. Apple and Microsoft could be next.
In 2015, with Unicode 8.0, the consortium in charge of creating emojis had the idea of adding a “Nerd Face” to the animated keyboards of our smartphones. An ironic emoji, with glasses and protruding teeth, supposed to pay homage to the idea that some people have of people who spend too much time behind their screen.
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Years later, there is still debate around this geek face. While the world of emoji is pretty slick and controversy-free (replacing the gun emoji with a water gun emoji is the perfect example), many don’t understand how a character designed to make fun of a community could exist. A 10-year-old child even launched a petition on November 27 to convince Apple to give up this emoji. Google and Meta have already replaced it.
Does a geek have protruding teeth?
If emojis regularly get people talking, it is true that the design of the “nerd” emoji is surprising. What are rabbit teeth doing here? We imagine that the Unicode consortium wanted to make a joke, without thinking that it could be misinterpreted.
On the site Emojipedia, specializing in the history of emojis, we can read that the “nerd” emoji has created several controversies in recent years. Some criticize it for being racist towards Asians, others for making fun of people with glasses… In 2017, two years after its introduction, Google was the first to make changes. The creator of Android had decided to ignore the two teeth wanted by the Unicode consortium, to give a normal smile to the “nerd” emoji. It now corresponds to a happy person with glasses, rather than a geek.
Meta, too, no longer wants rabbit teeth. From 2018 on Facebook, the “nerd” emoji adopted a crooked smile, with a closed mouth. He has round glasses that remind us of those of the minions of Despicable Me. Since 2023, on WhatsApp, the nerd emoji also no longer has protruding teeth.
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Should Apple and Microsoft follow the others?
Faced with the proliferation of controversies, is it time to break with the official definition of the “nerd” emoji? It would not be surprising to see Apple and Microsoft update their emojis to remove the famous protruding teeth. Another possibility: the introduction of a “person with glasses” emoji in a future version of the Unicode code, to avoid any doubt between a geek and a person with glasses. Only one thing is certain: it will not arrive for several months, since the future Unicode 16.0 will not offer it (but there will be “harp” and “shovel” emojis).