- Source: Peach emoji
The Peach emoji (🍑) is a fruit emoji depicting a pinkish-orange peach. The emoji is noted for its resemblance to human buttocks or the vulva, owing to the center crease, and is consequently frequently used as a euphemism for such on social media. Often paired with the eggplant emoji (🍆), the peach more often represents female.
Development and usage history
The peach emoji was originally included in proprietary emoji sets from au by KDDI. As part of a set of characters sourced from SoftBank Mobile, au by KDDI, and NTT Docomo emoji sets, the peach emoji was approved as part of Unicode 6.0 in 2010. Global popularity of emojis then surged in the early to mid-2010s. The peach emoji has been included in the Unicode Technical Standard for emoji (UTS #51) since its first edition (Emoji 1.0) in 2015.
Popularity on social media and cultural impact
The peach emoji is commonly used to represent buttocks or even female genitalia in sexting conversations. This usage has been noted to be common in the United States.
In line with the peach emoji's common usage in sexual contexts, Emojipedia noted that the emoji is popularly paired with the eggplant emoji (🍆), which is often used to represent a penis.
During the impeachment proceedings against President Trump in 2019, the peach emoji was used to render "impeachment" as "im🍑ment" by Trump opposers. The Christian Science Monitor noted that "peach" and "impeachment" are not etymologically related.
Reception
In 2015, Vice claimed that the peach emoji is a "leading contender" for a vulva emoji. In 2021, The Verge stated that peach emoji joined together with new bubbles emoji will be "great", while Cosmopolitan ranked the peach emoji as the 11th "horniest emoji".
In 2016, Apple Inc. brought back the peach emoji and attempted to redesign the emoji to less resemble buttocks; later some fans praised the emoji's comeback, but this was mostly met with fierce backlash in beta testing and Apple reversed its decision by the time it went live to the public. In April 2019, Facebook and Instagram both banned using the eggplant or peach emojis alongside sexual statements about "being horny".