Monarch Butterfly Emoji

Monarch Butterfly (🫌, U+1FACC) is one of the nine new emoji in Emoji 18.0, the emoji companion to Unicode 18.0, which the Unicode Consortium published on September 16, 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. Being final does not put the Monarch on your keyboard, though. Google has published a Monarch Butterfly design in its Noto Color Emoji font, but as of September 25, 2026, no operating system, keyboard, or system emoji font ships it, so expect a blank box or placeholder glyph until platforms ship support. Emojipedia's estimate, based on last year's rollout, is the first quarter of 2027 for WhatsApp, Samsung and Google's Android, around March or April 2027 for Apple, and late summer or early fall 2027 for Microsoft.