Video: Make Emojis Personal, How to Turn Yourself into an Emoji

Sometimes the little yellow faces just don’t quite cut it. I mean, sure, sending someone a pointing finger and an “OK” is always a good time, but what if you could make it a little more… personal.

Thanks to a friend, I recently discovered a new app called Bitmoji. The app takes our obsessive past-time of emojis and kicks it up a notch. After downloading the app from the Play Store/App Store, it walks you through the process of choosing physical characteristics step by step (video gamers will be very familiar with the tedious process of choosing just the right eyebrows for far too long) until you’ve made a cartoon-like version of yourself (complete with outfit, build, face shape, hair color –you name it).

After that’s done though, the app does its magic and creates a series of “emoji” with your new character in it. It has the typical LOL’s and TTYL’s but it takes it a bit further than that with images of, say, you hungover, you in a hazmat suit telling the sick person to feel better, and a ton more. Besides that though, the app gets updates regularly with new emojis to use –how about yourself holding #thedress in either blue/black or white/gold? Or maybe you with the champagne glass on your ass a la Kim Kardashian? Yeah, it gets hyper-topical up in here.

One of the best things about this app is how it works regardless of whether the person on the receiving end of such a glorious emoji has it installed or not. The app itself has you share from it to any number of popular messaging apps and just converts the image to a small png file when you send it. This means that anyone you send it to just gets it as a normal picture that we can all receive nowadays –clever.

Well, are you ready to give it whirl? Allow me walk you through it.

Make Yourself Your Emoji

It all starts with a random face…

1. Download and install the app from the App Store or Play Store.

2. When you open it, you’ll be asked to create your emoji through a series of different features you can customize –starting with your gender, face shape, etc. and ending with your outfit (don’t worry about getting the perfect features right away, you can always edit your avatar later).

3. Once you’ve finished that, it’ll generate all the “emoji”.

Send the New Emoji to a Friend (or Enemy for That Matter)

1. From within the Bitmoji app, tap on whatever category you want to sort by at the top (as far as I can tell they are: Star for favorites/new additions, the exclamation point for greetings, heart face for love specific ones, happy for happy, sad for sad, and present for encouragement maybe).

2. Then tap on one of the “emoji” you want to send and it’ll bring up sharing options.

3. Tap the app you want to use to share with and it’ll pop it into that app as an image ready to send.

4. Send away like any other picture message and wait for that person’s bewildered reaction.

5. Rinse. Repeat.

Also, if using an iPhone on iOS 8, you can set the new emoji to actually show up in your keyboard like the original ones do:

1. Go to Settings > General > Keyboards.

 

2. Tap on Keyboards > Bitmoji Keyboard > then turn on Allow Full Access.

3. Then by continuing to tap the globe in your keyboard like normal you can get to the bitmoji from there. Convenient!

It doesn’t get old and remember that they constantly add new ones to the list (they’re even pretty quick about catching trends –the blue dress ones sent me a notification saying they were added during that entire debacle).

Now, have fun sending them out into the world. Oh, and don’t get too offended when the inevitable happens –you have to explain that it’s you in the emoji.