According to Brandwatch, over 95% of online users have used emojis when communicating online, with over 10 billion emojis being sent each day from our devices. Pictures are worth 1,000 words and in digital spaces, this is truer than ever. On Twitter speech is often short and sweet, the average tweet length in 2020 was 33 characters. So naturally, emojis are the go-to for communicating efficiently online.
Ahead of 2022, the Unicode consortium has recommended a release of 107 new emojis which include beans, finger hearts and a glittering disco ball. However, there is one emoji that Vaporizers Direct feels is long overdue, and that is the cannabis leaf emoji.
So in celebration of World Emoji Day, Vaped.ca has designed their own set of emoji to share with weed enthusiasts after discovering the need by social media users, a vape pen and a marijuana leaf.
Social Media Users Activity Shows Demand for a Weed Emoji
With cannabis use becoming decriminalized in many countries around the world including Canada, Belgium, Spain and the many US States. Vaped.ca wanted to discover how social media users communicate about weed without having an official emoji.
By looking over 500,000 tweets, a Weed Affinity Index was created by analyzing multiple emojis associated with marijuana such as 😮💨, 😶🌫️,🥦 and cross-referenced these with popular terms such as “Weed”, “Vape” and “High” to determine the times it is used in relation to smoking weed.
What we found is that weed enthusiasts online are creatively stringing together emojis such as 😶🌫️, officially meaning ‘Face in the Clouds’, which is associated with a haze of smoke. The combo emoji affinity of usage in relation to weed is 96%. The Face Exhaling emoji 😮💨 is also widely used, with a 59% affinity in the Weed Affinity Index. Other emojis such as Broccoli 🥦, Maple Leaf 🍁, Seedling 🌱 are also all used. Yet, despite this use, a legitimate emoji signifying weed does not exist yet.
With this in mind, Founder, Christian Sculthorp thought it was time that a weed emoji was created for users to express their love for the recreational plant.
“Social media is how people connect and communicate and emojis are a huge part of that expression. We want our fans and weed enthusiasts around the world to have access to wider emojis to express the way they communicate and reflect the changing views of the formerly taboo topic of cannabis.”
According to the UTC, six variations of the weed emoji have been rejected so far in proposals. In relation to this, and ahead of World Emoji Day, Vaped.ca has created our own proposal for the Cannabis Leaf, as the universal signifier of weed. Available for download here:
Methodology
During June 2021 we examined over 500,000 tweets containing commonly used emojis used as a proxy for weed: 😮💨, 😶🌫️,🥦, 🍁, 🌱and 😵💫. We also examined their use alongside certain keywords such as ‘Weed’, ‘Vaped’ and ‘High’.
We then created a Weed Affinity Index which looked at the frequency of their use alongside each other, and as a total proportion of examined tweets.
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