Whatever happened to the water bottle emoji on the iPhone and other Apple products? Was the water bottle emoji deleted because there was something controversial about it? Is plastic that bad? Well, we’re here to tell you that there are many people wondering the same thing. But the reason is less insidious than you might think, and actually it tells you a lot about the power of memory.
Has the water bottle emoji been deleted from the iPhone?
No, the water bottle emoji has disappeared, because it was never there in the first place. Wait, what? You might have sworn that the icon was there before, but no, really, experts checked the Unicode Consortium and the water bottle emoji was never available on the iPhone. Perhaps there should be one, as this petition requests, but there was never one to begin with. As to why you might (mis)remember it being there can be chalked up to something called the Mandela Effect.
This isn’t the first time that an emoji has been falsely remembered. The most famous example is the robber emoji, which actually isn’t in any emoji set as far as we can tell. Users say that the emoji looked like a robber wearing a black beanie, a black mask, a white-and-black pinstripe shirt, and a beige moneybag with a “$” on it. But it never existed. Even with claims that it was a custom emoji, the lack of proof is deafening.
The same happened with the Hiker emoji as well. You’ll probably think that it’s a simple picture of a generic person with a walking stick and a backpack. But no, this picture never existed as an emoji either. There’s a Hiking Boot emoji, but that’s it.
The Mandela Effect is named after a situation where everyone at a conference thought that Nelson Mandela died in prison in the 1980s but actually died in 2013. A more technical term for the phenomenon is confabulation, a false memory typically created by filling in the gaps of what you don’t remember, sometimes with the insistence of what others claim they remembered. One of the most prominent examples of this is the Fruit of the Loom logo, which many people (including me) “remember” as having a cornucopia behind the fruits but was actually never there. Spooky.
In other news, here’s a full list of games for Xbox Game Pass for July 2022, and leaks indicate that Call of Duty 2024: Black Ops won’t be futuristic.
