Everyone is convinced there used to be a seahorse emoji, let’s debunk whether it ever existed

No because this has me doubting everything


Memory can be a strange thing, and it’s very easy for the internet to get heavily divided over something as simple as whether an emoji ever existed, in this case, a seahorse. That’s right, some of us are deadset on the fact there used to be a seahorse emoji whereas others think we’ve got it all wrong.

I personally do remember a yellow seahorse emoji that was facing left, but now I’m doubting my own memory. So, let’s debunk this theory and get to the bottom of whether the seahorse emoji ever existed in the first place.


This whole theory seems to have started on, of course, the Mandela effect subreddit where three years ago someone posted: “Anyone else remember the seahorse emoji?” This sparked a massive debate in the comments of everyone arguing over what they remember, with the general consensus being that everyone remembers it as facing left but the colour of the seahorse varied from orange to green or pink.

Anyone else remember the seahorse emoji
by inMandelaEffect

Someone later posted a picture on another subreddit of a yellow seahorse facing left, which supposedly ticks all the boxes, right? Well no, as it turns out this was the MSN messenger emoji for the seahorse, not the Apple one. There’s also a blue one that looks very similar but this is the Skype version of the emoji.

Via Reddit

When you check the Unicode Emoji website, which lists all the emojis for different platforms, on the Apple section there is no listing for a seahorse which means it has never featured as an emoji.

There are also two posts from 2020 and 2021, one on change.org and another on the Apple discussions board which request the company to introduce the seahorse emoji. On change.org the user wrote: “Seahorse emojis don’t exist anywhere. with the power of your vote, we can change that.”

On Apple, they added: “Hello, I would like to complain about the fact that you do not have a seahorse emoji. As you have many other animals in the ocean, it is very disrespectful to the seahorse.” The fact that people were requesting Apple add the seahorse emoji to keyboards is yet more proof it never existed.


Even when you ask ChatGPT to show you the seahorse emoji, it just becomes incredibly confused and shows the tropical fish and pufferfish emoji. So it looks like we’re not the only one confused by this whole situation.

Via Emojipedia

It seems like people might be getting the seahorse emoji mixed up with the tropical fish emoji, which also faces left and is yellow and blue. As we saw earlier there were also seahorse emojis on MSN Messenger and Skype which people could remember. But alas, as much as it might anger you to hear this, I can confirm the Apple seahorse emoji never existed.

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Featured images via TikTok, Twitter and Reddit before edits.