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The pandemic has affected nearly every aspect of modern life, from the clothes we wear to the food we eat and how we spend our time. But there is one thing that almost does not change: the emojis we send.

According to this data From the Unicode Consortium, which maintains digital text standards, nine of the 10 most used emojis in 2019 (at the time of their last data release) were also in the top 10 this year. The red heart emoji took the 2nd place and the tears of joy emoji took the 1st place despite the members of the Z generation. think you’re not cool (with side pieces and skinny jeans).

For people who create and review emojis, the persistence of tears of joy, also known as the laughing crying emoji, is not surprising.

“It tells how many people use emoji. “If emoji were a purely Gen Z thing, then you wouldn’t rank so high,” said Alexander Robertson, an emoji researcher at Google. “Due to the large number of people using emojis, even if a group thinks something is insufficient, they have to be a really large group to affect these stats.”

Jennifer Daniel, head of Unicode’s emoji subcommittee and creative director at Google, said it makes sense for Gen Z to think certain emojis aren’t cool. It’s part of the “teen experience of creating a sense of subculture where there is a right and wrong way of doing things.”

Also, Ms. Daniel noted that there is a “spectrum” of laughter that can be expressed through text: “There is a chuckle of light. There is only the laughter of approval, which is a sign of empathy. Using emojis such as ” skull face (“I died”) or crying face (uncontrollable tears of laughter) can help show this range.

But looking at a singular platform can tell a slightly different story. According to the data obtained from Twitter, while the most tweeted emoji in 2020 was tears of joy, it fell to the 2nd place this year with a crying face. Tears of joy saw a 23 percent drop in usage from 2020 to 2021.

However, the fact that most of the rest of the top 10 in Unicode’s dataset spanning multiple platforms and applications remained fairly consistent, showing how flexible the current emoji set is.

“Basically, it shows that we have what we need to convey a wide range of expressions and even very specific concepts,” Ms. Daniel said. Said. “You don’t necessarily need a Covid emoji or a vaccine emoji as you have the biceps, syringe, and Band-Aid that semantically convey the same thing.” Daniel added that at the start of the pandemic, people used the germ or virus, emoji and the crown emoji to refer to Covid (“corona” in Spanish means “crown”).

In terms of general usage, the syringe emoji has climbed to 193rd place this year, compared to 282nd place in 2019. Microbe is also 1,086 in 2019. It moved up to 477th place.

While the past two years have passed like never before, the range of emotions we express with emojis as we experience them was still largely familiar.

“We’ve seen an increase in the use of the virus emoji, but not in a way that even remotely matches the most widely used emojis, because we still had a lot to laugh and cry about. Pandemic or not,” said Lauren Gawne, co-host of the podcast “Lingthusiasm” and Australia, Senior lecturer in linguistics at La Trobe University in Melbourne.

“Even in the midst of this huge global pandemic that occupies so much of our time,” Ms Gawne added, “we still spent a lot of time wishing each other a happy birthday, or checking out or laughing at a new and unexpected element of this event, that slow burning weirdness.”