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SMNTY Classics: A Fruitful Look at the History of the Eggplant Emoji

March 18, 2026·28 min·2 clips

Instagram banned the eggplant emoji from search in 2015 to combat sexual harassment online.

The episode is a classic rerun introduced by host Annie, who notes her co-host Samantha is absent due to illness. Annie contextualizes the topic by referencing Apple's upcoming emoji releases, a recent SNL sketch about unpopular emojis, and a scene from the show Adolescence in which a detective's son explains that misunderstanding emoji meanings is embarrassing. The main episode begins with Annie and Samantha discussing their personal emoji habits — thumbs up, upside-down smiley, heart eyes — and their limited or accidental experiences with sexting. The hosts establish that the eggplant emoji is widely understood as internet shorthand for a penis, to the point that Instagram banned it from search in January 2015. They list the emojis that remained searchable — poop, banana, toilet, syringe, and peach — and note Facebook also banned it, citing efforts to combat sexual harassment. Dictionary.com's entry on the eggplant emoji is read aloud, tracing its use on Twitter to mean penis as early as 2011. In 2014, video artist Jessie Hill used the eggplant to represent Jay-Z's penis in an emoji translation of Beyoncé's Drunk in Love. Hashtag Eggplant Friday — men posting explicit images tagged with the phrase — emerged on Instagram in late 2014 and was shut down within months, spawning a hashtag Free the Eggplant campaign modeled on hashtag Free the Nipple. The hosts provide a brief sexting primer: eggplant plus mouth equals oral sex, eggplant plus peach equals vaginal or anal sex, eggplant plus water droplets equals ejaculation. A 2014 Divorce Court case is recounted in which a man had to explain the eggplant emoji's meaning to a confused judge on camera. The hosts then trace the emoji's origins to a 1998 Japanese telecom company that introduced emoji keyboards to sell pagers to teenagers, with the first 282 emojis including a banana but no eggplant. The eggplant emoji was added by the Unicode Consortium in 2010 and quickly adopted for sexual use by American iPhone users. Theories for why Americans chose the eggplant over the banana include the lack of prior cultural associations, the shape and color, and the implied size. A 2013 recommendation by the editor of Emoji Dick helped cement the eggplant's status. A Match.com study of nearly 5,700 singles found emoji users have sex about 20% more often and are twice as likely to get married. The episode closes with a discussion of emoji diversity milestones, including 2015 skin tone modifiers, 2016 expanded female occupation emojis, 2019 same-sex couples, and the 2020 transgender flag, as well as the commercial scale of emoji adoption — 5 billion emojis sent daily on Facebook Messenger.

As heard by us

A playful Society & Culture look at how the eggplant emoji became loaded with meaning.

Stuff Mom Never Told You frames the eggplant emoji as more than a throwaway joke, using its familiar double meaning as a way into the broader history behind a piece of digital culture.

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You want the weird behind-the-scenes banter around AI, data centers, and the things even smart hosts admit they do not fully understand.

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