How the mate emoji came to be
Written words are perfectly able to get your meaning across, but expert texters know that emojis are the true way to convey even the most complex emotions, feelings and reactions. Emojis are becoming more popular by the day, with Facebook reporting about 60 million emojis being posted or sent daily on its platform, so it’s no surprise that everyone wants to get in on the action.
Emojis can not only express emotions but also cause them — for instance, there was a great deal of discussion and debate over Apple’s controversial omission of cream cheese from their infamous bagel emoji; the bagel emoji itself being hotly debated at the Unicode offices, with one camp saying it was absolutely necessary for users to express their bagel-related feelings on social media, and the opposing camp being of the opinion that the donut emoji was good enough to pull double duty.
It’s unsurprising, then, that a group of plucky young journalists from Argentina began a campaign to get an important cultural item represented in emoji form — the humble mate. For those not in the know, mate is an infusion of hot water poured over the dried, ground up leaves of the yerba mate shrub, which is consumed through a kind of metal straw with a slotted end. Mate represents hospitality and friendship and you will never walk into an Argentine office without seeing one or more mate kits around.
So how does an idea become an emoji? First, certain requirements have to be met: the emoji must not be similar to another, it must be representative of a large region or community, it musn’t be related to any brand names, and it must be a lasting custom rather than a passing fad. With this in mind, the team worked for three days to design the emoji and write the full pitch for Unicode, which you can read here. After submitting this pitch, the team gave impassioned, three-minute defenses arguing for the emoji’s inclusion in California and Brooklyn.
After being approved (causing much joy among the people of Argentina, Uruguay and Paraguay, as well as other large mate consumers such as Lebanon, Syria and the south of Brazil), it was included in Unicode 12.0, released on March of 2019. As of September 2019, Emoji 12.0 has begun to be rolled out to major providers: as of this writing, Twitter, Microsoft, JoyPixels and Samsung have included the mate emoji in their collections, with Apple, and Facebook expected to get with the times throughout the last quarter of the year, and WhatsApp rolling out its update as of today, causing #WhatsApp to be a trending topic in Twitter Argentina.
So this year, among other additions, including gender-neutral emojis representing people, loads of new animals and foodstuffs, new accesibility-related emojis and more, expect to see this traditional drink’s emoji being shared obsessively by your Argentine coworkers and friends.
