By Hannah Fox
Emojis play such a crucial role in our conversations when it comes to texting, think about it. Last time you texted about food, did you really spell out “spaghetti,” or did you just settle with the ease of the emoji? Yep, us too.
Joel Simkhai is the founder of gay dating app, Grindr, and the brand made an announcement that this week they released a new emoji keyboard called “Gaymoji,” featuring images of unicorns, animals, rainbows, objects, foods and more that Simkhai thinks encompass gay pop culture.
100 Gaymojis will be available through the app as of this week, and for $3.99 more, users can unlock 400 more images that fall into categories like Mood, Objects, Body, Dating and Sex.
In an interview with New York Times, Simkhai said that the idea behind Gaymoji was that in his own use of the app, he felt limited when it came to what emojis he could use in conversation. For example, he said, if he wanted to talk about going dancing, the only emoji on the iPhone keyboard, was the woman dancing in the red Salsa dress. Simkhai added that 20% of Grindr messages include emojis, so why not add ones specifically catered to the app’s 3 million users’ conversations?
Grindr isn’t the first app that we’ve seen come out with a gay-themed keyboard, as last fall an app called “Homoji” came out, offering brightly-colored rainbows and flamboyant cartoons. We’ve already got friends sending us Gaymojis from their new keyboards, so seems to be a hit thus far!