Update: While the taco emoji became official in June, today, October 21, you can get it on your iPhone by updating to iOS 9.1. The update also includes tweaks to Live Photos for the iPhone 6S, performance enhancements, and bug fixes, as well as other notable emoji such as a burrito, hot dog, and unicorn. To get the new emoji, head to Settings, General, Software Update.
Attention: We have a very important emoji announcement to make. The taco emoji is finally, finally here. Your text messages, Instagrams, and Snapchats are now complete.
The taco emoji arrives along with 37 other new emoji in Unicode 8.0 today, but it tops the list as one of the most requested icons. (Taco Bell even launched a Change.org campaign to petition for the addition of a taco emoji.) While we love tacos as a food, the big deal about this particular emoji is that now, ladies, we can use it to represent the vagina — a counterpart to the phallic eggplant emoji, perhaps? Your iPhone messages just got that much naughtier.
There are also several other VIEs (Very Important Emoji) joining the taco in this update: the burrito (Cali represent!), the cheese wedge, the hot dog, the unicorn face, and the champagne-bottle-with-popping-cork. You can check out the full list here.
Apple recently diversified its emoji lineup with new icons and varied skin tones. And, just last month, the Unicode Consortium, the organization that standardizes emoji icons, offered a sneak peek of emoji that will arrive in 2016 (which, thankfully, includes bacon).
While today's new icons have been adopted by the Unicode Consortium, they haven't yet shown up in Apple's and Google's emoji libraries — but, those companies would be crazy not to include them. After all, the progress of human culture depends on being able to send messages filled with food cartoons.
This article was originally published on Jun 17, 2015.