The same emoji, drawn 4 ways

1 character, several pictures

Unicode standardises the character and a name for it. What it looks like is left to whoever draws the set, which is why 🙏 is a prayer in 1 set and a high five in another, and why a face that reads as amused on your phone can read as smug on someone else's. The text you send is identical; the picture the other person sees is not.

That is worth knowing before a message carries the weight of an emoji: the safest ones are the ones every set draws the same way, and the riskiest are faces with a small mouth difference between vendors.

Why Apple and Samsung are not here

Their artwork is licensed for use on their own devices and cannot be redistributed by a site like this one. What can be shipped is the 4 open sets above, and that is what these columns are. The first column is the exception and the interesting one: it is not an image at all, it is the character itself, drawn by whatever device you are reading this on. On an iPhone that column is Apple's set.

• Noto by Google, under SIL Open Font License 1.1
• Twemoji by the Twemoji project, under CC BY 4.0
• OpenMoji by HfG Schwäbisch Gmünd, under CC BY-SA 4.0
• Blobmoji by the Blobmoji project, under Apache 2.0