Last but not least: emoji sex
On World AIDS Day, it became clear: Humanity needs a condom emoji.
After all, sexting these days usually doesn’t happen with words anymore, but with pictures. Since there aren’t any «built-in» risqué emojis, fruits, donuts, or fingers are repurposed as symbols of a more intimate nature. And whenever sex is involved—even casually—condoms should be part of the conversation. Unfortunately, there’s no condom emoji. Even though most people probably feel a more urgent need for a vomiting emoji: Durex wants a condom—and has therefore recently launched the ##CondomEmoji campaign. The idea behind the campaign, created by Havas London, is for people to use the hashtag as often as possible, thereby encouraging the emoji creators to introduce a condom emoji.
The MTV Staying Alive Foundation, which fights the HIV virus worldwide, is taking a similar approach. To mark World AIDS Day, the foundation—with the help of the agency Y&R New York—launched an explicit ad featuring human emojis, produced by Oscar-winning Hollywood editor Angus Wall.
The advertisement is for a free-to-install Condom Emoji Keyboard, which was developed in collaboration with Snaps (more on this). Among other things, Snaps creates customized emojis and chat icons for companies. The keyboards can be manually added to messaging apps, and the icons can be used. While these aren't official emojis that come pre-installed on every system, they can be used just like them. Either way, the rule is: at least one emoji. (hae)
