The Seahorse Emoji Disappeared from iPhones, but Did It Ever Actually Exist?

For more than a decade now, emojis have been a crucial part of how we communicate with one another. Some emojis are remarkably common in both texts and other forms of communication, but others are used much less frequently, which can lead to some confusion about which emojis actually exist.

Recently, a subset of iPhone users have become convinced that there was a seahorse emoji on the phones that was removed at some point. Here's what we know about that emoji and what may have happened to it.

What happened to the seahorse emoji?

While plenty of people are convinced that the emoji existed, there's no actual evidence that it ever did. Even so, many people remember having access to it and using it, but among those who remember the emoji, there's some diversity of opinion over whether it was blue, orange, or white and what direction it might have been facing. Even so, many users swear that the emoji existed and that they had at least one occasion to use it.

The seahorse emoji might be a new Mandela effect.

The collective remembrance of something that never happened is often referred to as the Mandela effect and it's been attached to everything from whether the Monopoly Man wears a monocle (he doesn't) to whether Nelson Mandela died in prison (he didn't). According to a subreddit dedicated to this topic, the seahorse emoji is not the first emoji that may have never actually existed.

According to a moderator on that forum: "2016 and 2017 are when we first started seeing posts about missing emojis; hiking emoji, robber emoji, swordfish emoji."

The first instance of someone suggesting that there may have once been a seahorse emoji came in 2021, and it has popped up on Reddit, TikTok, and other places since as users separately discover that the emoji is gone, and come to wonder whether it ever existed in the first place.

There's no evidence the seahorse emoji was real.

As much as many may swear that they used the seahorse emoji at one time or another, there's no verifiable evidence that the emoji ever existed. It appears to be a form of collective delusion, but one that many people will likely remain convinced was real for years to come.

If Apple is looking to add a new emoji, though, checking which emojis people already believe exist might be a good place to start. Of course, if people become convinced that the emoji doesn't exist and then it suddenly shows up on their phone because Apple decides to introduce it for the first time, that could definitely mess with some people's heads.

It might make sense to add a seahorse, although it's not the kind of emoji that a person could imagine using every day. Of course, there are plenty of real emojis that that's also true about, so it seems a little strange that the seahorse emoji doesn't already exist in some form.