Eggplant Emoji

In 2011, Unicode added an eggplant emoji to the standard set. It was meant to represent an eggplant. Americans, famously unfamiliar with actual eggplants, had other ideas.

The phallic association was immediate and unstoppable. As First We Feast noted, "It's precisely because Americans had no cultural association with eggplants prior to the emoji revolution that it was the perfect euphemism." 🍆 became code, a wink, a proposition. #EggplantFriday emerged as men's answer to... well, nothing anyone asked for. Over 125,000 Instagram posts later, the platform banned eggplant hashtag searches entirely in 2015.

The #FreeTheEggplant movement briefly flared, but the damage was done. The eggplant's transgressive thrill depended on plausible deniability, and once your grandma understood the subtext, the game was over. Newer emojis—🍑, 💦, the inexplicable 🥒—diluted the market.

The eggplant still appears, but its reign as the internet's go-to innuendo has ended. It's just an eggplant now. Mostly.

Pour one out for the vegetable that was never really about vegetables.