Have you ever been in a situation where you were sexting your partner and just couldn’t find the right emoji to spice up the conversation? popWell, LELO (the ultra-luxury sex toy brand) is working on expanding their emoji library to accommodate all your steamy NSFW interactions.
Is sexting straight away on a dating app a red flag?
Potential sex toy emoji
LELO is asking people to help develop the world’s first sex toy emoji (which resembles the suction vibrator SONA 2 Cruise) by signing the “Implement a Sex Toy Emoji in Unicode” petition on Change.org. Fewer than 100 people have signed the petition as of the publication of this article, but LELO hopes to gather at least one million signatures, after which they will submit the petition to the Unicode Consortium (the non-profit organization responsible for emojis, which manages the universal emoji standard).
Unicode now adds new emojis every year, and the latest emojis that may make it into iOS 18 appear to include a swollen-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 a “Help us get an official #sexemoji” campaign, but it only garnered 1,002 signatures.
Mashable After Dark
“No matter how much attention we all begin to pay to our bodies and minds, there’s an alarming trend when it comes to sexual health: silence,” LELO CMO Luka Matutinovic said in a press release.
“We can talk about supplements and mental health, but at the same time we feel uncomfortable talking about masturbation – both in terms of self-care and pleasure! This makes researching masturbation incredibly difficult,” he continued. “People feel increasingly uncomfortable revealing 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 found that 76% of respondents use emojis when communicating about sex, so why not make your life easier with a vibrator emoji?
For now, there are only peach, eggplant, and water droplets (which, incidentally, were the most popular emojis among LELO survey participants). Subtly In an attempt to get their message across, they often turn intimate moments into little jokes. (Genmoji, the ability to create your own emoji, probably doesn’t help in this regard.) We’re adults, and we deserve emoji that reflect the nuances of our desires without relying on silly fruit metaphors.
“They say that shame disappears when you create a safe space to tell stories,” Matutinovic says, “and I would add that with the right words and alternatives to words like emojis, shame can disappear even more. That’s why this sex toy emoji is the next milestone in completely liberating the discussion around sex.”
