From the humble thumbs up to a grinning cowboy, there is now an emoji for almost every situation.
But social media users are convinced that one of their favourite icons has disappeared.
In a viral video on TikTok, one user wrote: ‘Please tell me somebody remembers the emoji of a girl wearing her hair in a towel and she has cucumbers over her eyes like she is at the spa!
‘I cannot find it and now I’m realizing it doesn’t exist but I remember it so vividly, is this just me?’
This confused social media user was not alone as commenters flocked to share their support.
One wrote: ‘I was just looking for her the other day! She absolutely existed!!’
While another chimed in: ‘She 1,000% existed. How did we not realize she’s gone?!’
So, do you remember this missing emoji?
Social media users are convinced that an emoji featuring a woman wearing a towel with cucumbers over her eyes has vanished from their phones. So, do you remember it?
Some existing emoji are similar to the description of the ‘missing emoji’. The ‘Woman in Steamy Room’ emoji on iOS features a woman wearing a towel on her head but with no cucumbers on her eyes
All 3,782 official emoji are published by the Unicode Consortium, the body responsible for deciding the standard set of emoji.
While some existing emoji have some of the spa emoji’s characteristics, there has never been an official emoji matching this description.
Even taking into account how emoji can vary across different devices, there is no record of an emoji featuring a woman wearing a towel with cucumbers over her eyes.
The ‘Woman in Steamy Room’ emoji on iOS features a woman wearing a towel on her head but with no cucumbers on her eyes.
Likewise, the ‘Person Getting Massage’ emoji is similar but misses a few key details.
However, that hasn’t stopped many social media users from being absolutely convinced this emoji exists.
On TikTok, a number of commenters even claimed to remember extremely specific and consistent details about the icon.
One commenter wrote: ‘Yes and she was wearing a pink robe and teal towel on her head.’
Despite no evidence that this emoji existed, commenters were convinced that they remembered using it
Some commenters even had very specific memories about the emoji, such as the colour of the towel and robe
Another added: ‘It was a light pink towel and a light green mask.’
While another agreed: ‘Yeah she had the blue clay mask on.’
Other commenters felt like they had extremely specific memories of using the emoji.
One social media user wrote: ‘Yessssss… I am an esthetician and REMEMBER USING THIS EMOJI.’
‘It existed bc I used it all the time and now the regular steam towel lady doesn’t convey the same message,’ added another.
This emoji could be an example of the so-called Mandela Effect – a phenomenon where a group of people believe something occurred when it did not.
The effect is named after the false but widespread belief that Nelson Mandela died in prison during the 1980s, when in reality he died at home in 2013.
Psychologists say that this is a form of collective false memory caused by the way our brains tend to mix up information from the past.
Earlier this year, social media users were convinced they remembered a ‘robber emoji’. The search for this missing emoji sparked speculation that it might have originated from the Bitlife life-simulation game. However, no evidence for this theory has been found
If someone remembers seeing a vaguely similar image and then is told that this spa emoji exists, their mind will fill in the gaps and create a false memory of seeing it.
Since our memories aren’t great for small details, something like whether an emoji has cucumbers over their eyes can easily be misremembered.
Some users were quick to suggest their own theories as to how these memories might have arisen.
Proposed sources of the false memory included a cartoon icon from the TV show Lizzie McGuire or the cover of the children’s book series ‘American Girl’.
The most popular suggestion is that this was an icon from the life simulator game Bitlife, which was advertised widely across social media.
This game features a number of emoji-like icons, which could be mistaken for an official iOS or Android emoji.
Previously, social media users became convinced that Bitlife was the source of another popular ‘missing emoji’.
TikTok users were certain that they remembered an emoji showing a woman dressed as a robber with a black and white striped shirt.
One TikTok user purchased an original first-generation iPad to search for the robber emoji, but could not find any evidence that it existed
Just like the robber emoji, there is currently no evidence that the ‘spa’ emoji ever existed. This could be an example of the Mandela Effect, a phenomenon where a group of people believe something occurred when it did not
In one TikTok video, a user even went through a first-generation iPad to see if it was an older emoji that had since been deleted.
Since the robber emoji could not be found anywhere, it was widely circulated that Bitlife was the origin of the elusive ‘robber emoji’.
However, there was never any evidence to show that the robber icon or emoji was part of the Bitlife game.
Likewise, while there is a ‘spa’ activity in Bitlife, there is no icon associated with it that could be the source of any confusion.
ARE EMOJIS RUINING THE ENGLISH LANGUAGE?
Emojis may be a fun form of communication but they are destroying the English language, a recent study by Google has revealed.
Smiley faces, love hearts, thumbs up and other cartoon icons – rather than words – are the preferred method of communication by teenagers, who are considered the worst offenders regarding the decline in grammar and punctuation.
More than a third of British adults believe emojis are the reason for the deterioration in proper language usage, according to the study commissioned by the Google-owned site YouTube.
Emojis were first used by Japanese mobile phone companies in the late 1990s to express an emotion, concept or message in a simple, graphic way. Now, Twitter feeds, text messages and Facebook posts are crammed with them
Of the two thousand adults, aged 16 to 65, who were asked their views, 94 per cent reckoned English was in a state of decline, with 80 per cent citing youngsters as the worst offenders.
The most common errors made by Brits are spelling mistakes (21 per cent), followed closely by apostrophe placement (16 per cent) and the misuse of a comma (16 per cent).
More than half of British adults are not confident with their command of spelling and grammar, the study also found.
Furthermore, around three-quarters of adults rely on emoji to communicate, in addition to a dependence on predictive text and spell checking.
The use of emojis has seeped into our culture to such an extent that the Oxford Dictionary’s ‘Word of the Year’ in 2015 wasn’t actually a word at all – it was the Face With Tears emoji, which shows just how influential the little graphic images have become.
They were first used by Japanese mobile phone companies in the late 1990s to express an emotion, concept or message in a simple, graphic way.
