A specific species, carved out of the generic Butterfly emoji's cross-platform rendering mismatch — drafted for Emoji 18.0, expected alongside Unicode 18.0 in September 2026. Draft only: not yet approved, and no font renders it yet. Click to copy the codepoint anyway.
Monarch Butterfly (, U+1FACC) is a candidate emoji drafted for Emoji 18.0, the emoji companion to Unicode 18.0, expected to finalize in September 2026. It exists to fix a real fragmentation problem: the existing generic Butterfly emoji (🦋) renders as a blue Morpho on some platforms and as something closer to a Monarch on others, so two people could exchange the identical codepoint and picture two different insects — "you might have been texting them a Monarch butterfly while they were looking at a Morpho." Requests for it go back years on Apple's own community forums, where users have pointed to the Monarch's iconic orange-and-black coloring and its endangered status as reasons it deserves its own slot. Unicode is normally reluctant to approve species-specific variants, but frequency data showing Butterfly as the most-used animal emoji in its subcategory made the case for carving out its most recognizable species. The emoji itself carries the Monarch's migration story — "generational resilience, endurance, and deep ancestral memory," a creature that crosses thousands of miles across lifespans it never completes. Because it's still a draft, no operating system, keyboard, or font currently renders it; expect a blank box or placeholder glyph until Emoji 18.0 is approved and platforms ship support, likely sometime in 2027.
The draft character itself — copyable today as a codepoint, even though no font can render it yet.
The already-encoded generic emoji Monarch Butterfly is carved out of, and the neighbor it's most often rendered as by mistake.
Monarch Butterfly isn't the only unapproved character in this release — these are drafted alongside it, equally unrendered until September 2026's decision.
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The Emoji 18.0 draft candidate that won the public vote.
Another Emoji 18.0 draft candidate — reassigned from a deferred Apple Core proposal.
The full draft slate of 9 candidates, ranked by public vote.