The Eggplant emoji (🍆), also known by its Unicode name of Aubergine, is an emoji featuring a purple eggplant. Social media users have noted the emoji's phallic appearance and often use it as a euphemistic or suggestive icon during sexting conversations, to represent a penis. It is frequently paired and often contrasted with the peach emoji (🍑), representing the buttocks (or vulva).

The eggplant emoji was originally included in proprietary emoji sets from SoftBank Mobile and au by KDDI.^[1] When Apple released the first iPhone in 2007, there was an emoji keyboard intended for Japanese users only,^[2] which encoded them using SoftBank's Private Use Area scheme.^[3] However, after iPhone users in the United States discovered that downloading Japanese apps allowed access to the keyboard, pressure grew to expand the availability of the emoji keyboard beyond Japan.^[2]

As part of a set of characters sourced from SoftBank, au by KDDI, and NTT Docomo emoji sets, the eggplant emoji was approved as part of Unicode 6.0 in 2010 under the name "Aubergine".^[4] In 2011, Apple made the emoji keyboard a standard iOS feature worldwide.^[2] Global popularity of emojis then surged in the early to mid-2010s.^[5] The eggplant emoji has been included in the Unicode Technical Standard for emoji (UTS #51) since its first edition (Emoji 1.0) in 2015.^[4]

The "aubergine" or "eggplant" emoji is commonly used to represent a penis in sexting conversations.^[10][11] This usage has been noted to be common, particularly in the United States,^[12][13] as well as in Canada.^[14] In line with the eggplant emoji's common usage in sexual contexts, Emojipedia noted that the emoji is popularly paired with the peach emoji (🍑), which is often used to represent buttocks^[15] or female genitalia.^[16]

The emoji was used as a reference to penis on Twitter as early as 2011.^[10][17] By the mid-2010s, online magazine outlets wrote about how the emoji's usage in sexual contexts morphed society's connotations of the eggplant "from an innocuous vegetable to America's favorite shorthand for a throbbing cock."^[14][18] Slate writer Amanda Hess stated that "the eggplant has risen to become America's dominant phallic fruit."^[13] Writing for Cosmopolitan, Kathryn Lindsay stated that "this simple, previously neglected vegetable rocketed into stardom in a matter of years, thanks to our collective decision to deem it the universal symbol for dick."^[18]

In 2018, Dictionary.com became the first major reference to add explanations for emojis,^[16] although these explanations are only included on the editorial section of the website.^[19]

The eggplant emoji has been referenced by popular culture numerous times. In 2017, Netflix won a bidding war to distribute a film titled The Eggplant Emoji.^[20] The film was ultimately renamed The Package. In 2019, the cosmetics retailer Lush sold bath bombs resembling the eggplant emoji for Valentine's Day.^[21] The company expanded their eggplant and peach emoji-themed product line the following year.^[22]

As early as 2013, online media outlets have commented on the eggplant emoji's resemblance to a penis, with Complex listing it as one of "10 emojis to send while sexting."^[23]

In April 2015, Instagram released a feature allowing users to hashtag emojis.^[24] Shortly after, the platform banned the hashtag "🍆", as well as any references to "eggplant" from its search function.^[24][25] Later in 2019, Facebook and Instagram both banned using the eggplant or peach emojis alongside "sexual statements about being horny."^[26]

In 2016, the eggplant emoji's widespread usage as sexual innuendo led the American Dialect Society to vote it as the "Most Notable Emoji" of 2015.^[10][27]