The peach emoji has had a tumultuous few months. When Apple rolled out the beta version of iOS 10.2, everybody’s favorite G-rated but still semi-explicit pictograph had been redrawn and looked significantly less like a butt. Following the outcries of “think of the sexts!” Apple relented and returned the emoji to its former gluteal glory. Now, the folks over at Emojipedia — the go-to website for everything you ever wanted to know about emoji — have crunched the numbers to find out exactly how many people online are actually using the peach as a substitute for a bum and how many are actually just talking about their favorite Roald Dahl story.
Studying a set of 1,618 random tweets in English over a 12-hour period, Emojipedia discerned that 33 percent of people were using the emoji as “shorthand for butt,” while 27 percent of people tweeting the emoji were using it sexually. Only 7 percent of people were actually tweeting about fruit, which was still a larger number than the 4 percent of people using the emoji to express happiness or feeling “peachy.” While it’s not a terribly comprehensive study — Emojipedia notes since these were public tweets, their data doesn’t do much for intel on how people use the peach in private — 93 percent of the tweets analyzed had nothing to do with actual fruit.
Emojipedia also studied the most popular emoji people use in tandem with the peach. Unsurprisingly, the winner by a solid margin was the eggplant emoji, though Emojipedia also notes many of the tweets containing multiple emoji were “promotional tweets from a flower bot.” And yet. Eggplant. Peach. You do the math.
