Eggplant 🍆

The eggplant appears as a deep purple teardrop or elongated bulb with a leafy green crown at the top, mimicking the vegetable's distinctive coloring and shape. Its glossy, smooth surface and the contrasting vibrant green stem create a visually striking design that's immediately recognizable. The rich purple hue is particularly vivid across all platform designs.

While the eggplant emoji started as a straightforward representation of the vegetable used in cooking—baba ganoush, eggplant parmesan, stir-fries—it quickly evolved into something far more loaded. Internet culture has weaponized this emoji as a sexual innuendo, and it's become one of the most infamous double-meaning emoji. This secondary meaning overshadows its culinary purpose in many modern conversations, especially on dating apps and flirty messages.

Despite (or perhaps because of) its cheeky reputation, the eggplant still works legitimately in food discussions. Cooks and recipe enthusiasts use it genuinely when discussing vegetable preparations. The emoji exists in this interesting tension between culinary usefulness and cultural meme status, making context crucial.

Social media platforms have occasionally cracked down on eggplant emoji use in certain contexts, aware of its double meaning. The emoji was approved as part of Unicode 0.6 and added to Emoji in 2010, long before its current reputation, making it a fascinating case study in how emoji meanings drift and transform through internet culture over time.