Two different eye emojis?

Question

As far as I knew, there are currently two emojis for eyes. The pair of eyes (U+1F440) with hex code f09f9180 (👀), and a single eye (U+1F441) with hex code f09f9181 (👁).

I now found when using the emojis of the keyboard in my phone that another eye emoji exists, with hex code f09f9181efb88f (👁️).

The gajim messenger on the PC, and the Conversations app on the mobile phone, can display both. The gajim emoji-chooser only contains the short sequence and the Swiftkey-Keyboard Emoji-Chooser only the longer one.

When I copy and paste the emojis i.e. in the Firefox URL address bar, they look the same (blue eye, while the messengers both display them in black). When I Google for the emojis, I only find pages describing the shorter code point.

Firefox renders both emojis the same, but Vivaldi (Chromium based) shows the one with the shorter code point as narrow black and white emoji and the other one as larger brown eye.

When I Google for the hex dump, I find a lot of emojipedia sites for the shorter dump, and nothing useful at all for the longer one.

Is there somewhere any documentation about the additional emoji? Why aren't both emojis available in both emoji choosers?

Answer 1

f0 9f 91 80 is the UTF-8 encoded form of codepoint U+1F440.

f0 9f 91 81 is the UTF-8 encoded form of codepoint U+1F441.

f0 9f 91 81 ef b8 8f is the UTF-8 encoded form of codepoints U+1F441 U+FE0F.

U+FE0F is a Variation Selector:

Variation Selectors is a Unicode block containing 16 Variation Selector format characters (designated VS1 through VS16). They are used to specify a specific glyph variant for a Unicode character. They are currently used to specify standardized variation sequences for mathematical symbols, emoji symbols, 'Phags-pa letters, and CJK unified ideographs corresponding to CJK compatibility ideographs. At present only standardized variation sequences with VS1, VS15 and VS16 have been defined.

Where U+FE0F is VARIATION SELECTOR-16:

U+FE0F was added to Unicode in version 3.2 (2002). It belongs to the block Variation Selectors in the Basic Multilingual Plane.

This character is a Nonspacing Mark and inherits its script property from the preceding character.

The glyph is not a composition. It has a Ambiguous East Asian Width. In bidirectional context it acts as Nonspacing Mark and is not mirrored. In text U+FE0F behaves as Combining Mark regarding line breaks. It has type Extend for sentence and Extend for word breaks. The Grapheme Cluster Break is Extend.

This codepoint may change the appearance of the preceding character. If that is a symbol, dingbat or emoji, U+FE0F forces it to be rendered as a colorful image as compared to a monochrome text variant. The Unicode standard defines some standardized variants. See also “Unicode symbol as text or emoji” for a discussion of this codepoint.

In other words, U+FE0F tells VS-aware software to render U+1F441 as a colorful emoji instead of as monochromatic text.