Have you ever been in a situation where you were sexting your beau and couldn't find the right emoji to make the conversation pop? Well, LELO (the ultra-luxe sex toy brand) is working on making the emoji library better equipped to handle your steamy NSFW exchanges.
The company's asking you to help develop the world's first sex toy emoji (it looks like the suction vibrator SONA 2 Cruise) by signing the "Implement the Sex Toy Emoji in Unicode" petition on Change.org. Less than 100 people have signed as of publication, but LELO is hoping to obtain at least one million signatures. Then, they'll submit the petition to the Unicode Consortium, the nonprofit organization that manages the universal emoji standard (AKA the folks in charge of emojis).
Unicode currently adds new emoji on an annual basis. The latest — which could come to iOS 18 — appear to include a baggy-eyed face, a harp, and a fingerprint. Not very sexy.
This isn't the first time LELO has tried to get a sex toy emoji approved. In 2021, the company launched the "Support our application for an official #sexemoji" campaign, but it only managed to get 1,002 signatures.
"No matter how much we have all started paying attention to our bodies and minds, there's a worrying trend concerning sexual wellness; it is the silence," said LELO CMO Luka Matutinovic in a press release.
"We can talk about supplements, about mental health, but at the same time dread talking about masturbation. Both in the context of self-care and the context of pleasure! This also makes masturbation incredibly difficult to study," he continued. "People get increasingly uncomfortable with disclosing such personal and intimate details of their lives. As a sexual wellness brand, LELO is acutely aware of the lack of conversation surrounding the topic of masturbation."
A LELO survey shows that 76 percent of respondents use emojis when communicating about sex — so why not make life easier with a vibrator emoji?
Right now, we're stuck with peaches, eggplants, and water droplets (the most popular emojis among LELO's survey participants, by the way). While these emojis might subtly get the message across, they often turn intimate moments into a bit of a joke. (Genmoji, the ability to create our own emoji, likely won't help this front.) We're adults, and we deserve emojis that reflect the nuances of our desires without resorting to silly fruit metaphors.
"It is said that shame disappears when you create safe spaces for stories to be told," said Matutinovic. "We would like to add that having adequate words or substitution for words, like an emoji, further helps erase the shame. It is because of this that the next milestone in fully liberating the discourse on sex is this sex toy emoji."
