Google’s emoji mashups
Pick two emoji and Google hands back a single drawing that combines them: a cowboy hat on a ghost, a heart on a frog. There are over 100,000 of these, and not one of them is an emoji. They are pictures, which changes everything about where they work.
🐸 + 🤠
= a sticker, not a character
Quick answer
Emoji Kitchen is a Google feature that mixes two emoji into one sticker. Google has published it in two places: Gboard, its keyboard for Android, and Google Search, where a panel appeared in 2024 for combining any two emoji.
Every mashup is a drawing made by Google’s designers. That is the detail worth holding onto, because it explains the rest of this page: why some pairs give you nothing, why the results cannot go in your bio, and why nobody but Google has them.
Using it
Open a chat, tap the emoji key, then tap an emoji. Mashups that include it appear in a row for you to tap, and the one you choose is sent as a sticker. Google listed Gmail, Messages, Messenger, Snapchat, Telegram and WhatsApp as places this works when it launched.
Search Google for emoji kitchen. Google added a panel in July 2024 with a combine tab for mixing two emoji of your choice and an explore tab for seeing what a single emoji pairs with. This is the route that does not need Gboard, which matters on an iPhone.
Check that Gboard is your keyboard and that it is up to date. If it is, the emoji you tapped may simply have no mashups drawn for it, which looks identical to the feature being missing.
Sites such as emojikitchen.dev and emojimix by Tikolu let you browse the same Google drawings from a desktop, which is where the searches for emoji mix by tikolu end up. They are made by other people, not by Google, and the artwork remains Google’s wherever you find it.
The important part
Every emoji on the rest of this site is a Unicode character: a number your phone turns into a picture, which survives being copied into a message, a bio or a document. An Emoji Kitchen mashup has no number behind it. It is an image file, so:
It is the same arrangement as a custom emoji in a Slack workspace or TikTok’s shortcode emoji: the app knows what picture to show, and outside it there is nothing. Emoji in apps covers why that distinction keeps coming up.
Why a pair gives you nothing
Emoji Kitchen is not a generator. Google draws each mashup, which is why the library is counted in drawings and not in pairs: over 100,000 of them by July 2024. Two smileys almost always produce something, because that is where the drawing effort went. Pair a smiley with an unusual object, and often nothing comes back.
Combinations have also disappeared between updates, which is what the support forums fill up with each time the library changes. Nothing is promised to stay.
How it grew
| When | What changed |
|---|---|
| February 2020 | Emoji Kitchen arrives for Gboard on Android. Google describes the stickers as handcrafted by its designers, and they can be sent from Gmail, Messages, Messenger, Snapchat, Telegram and WhatsApp. |
| December 2020 | More than 14,000 combinations, and Google says people have shared more than three billion stickers since launch. |
| July 2024 | More than 100,000 drawings, and Emoji Kitchen comes to Google Search with a combine tab for mixing any two emoji and an explore tab for seeing what one emoji pairs with. |
| September 2025 | Updates for browsing the library, saving favourites and getting suggested combinations. |
If you need text
When the thing you are decorating only takes text, a mashup is no help. Two emoji typed side by side carry more than people expect: 🐸☕ is a whole sentence, and it pastes anywhere. For profiles, bio emoji and bio symbols both survive a copy and paste, and kaomoji build faces out of ordinary characters, which is the original way of doing exactly what Emoji Kitchen does with pictures.
Questions
A Google feature that mixes two emoji into a single sticker, such as a cowboy hat on a ghost. The results are drawings made by Google's designers, not new emoji: there is no character behind them and no other company has them.
In Gboard on Android, open a chat, tap the emoji key and tap an emoji. Mashups that include it appear in a row, and tapping one sends it as a sticker. Google also put Emoji Kitchen in Search in 2024, where searching for emoji kitchen brings up a panel for combining two emoji.
Google announced it for Gboard on Android, and that is where the keyboard feature lives. On an iPhone the way in is Google Search in a browser, which is the same set of drawings without the keyboard.
It appears in Gboard, so it needs Gboard set as your keyboard and up to date. It also shows nothing when the emoji you tapped has no mashups drawn for it. Both are worth checking before assuming the feature has gone.
Because every mashup is drawn by hand rather than generated. A pair exists only if someone at Google made a picture for it, which is why two smileys usually work and a smiley with an unusual object often produces nothing at all.
You can send one anywhere that accepts an image or a sticker, but you cannot type one into a bio, a username or a document. They are pictures, so there is no character to copy and nothing to paste as text.
People use the phrase for the same thing. Emoji mix is also the name of an unofficial website that browses the same Google drawings. Google's own name for the feature is Emoji Kitchen.
Sources
Every date and figure above is Google’s own. This page explains the feature and does not reproduce it: the drawings belong to Google, and the only places to get one are Google’s.
Keep exploring
[smile]
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