# Emoji in SMS

> An emoji in an SMS forces Unicode encoding, cutting the message capacity from 160 to 70 characters, and some emoji take two Unicode units, so a single symbol can add a whole segment.

Emoji are not in the GSM-7 alphabet, so one emoji switches the message to UCS-2. Many emoji are encoded as surrogate pairs, two 16-bit units, so they count as two of the 70 characters. A 150-character marketing text with one heart becomes three segments instead of one.

Emoji can be worth it in a short promotional message where the visual matters. They are never worth it in codes, alerts or receipts, and they should be avoided in campaigns to countries where the route replaces or filters them.

At SMSMeteor: the composer flags the encoding switch the moment an emoji is inserted and shows the new segment count.

Related terms: [UCS-2 (Unicode SMS)](https://smsmeteor.com/glossary/ucs-2), [SMS segment](https://smsmeteor.com/glossary/segment), [Character counter](https://smsmeteor.com/glossary/character-counter)

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Source: https://smsmeteor.com/glossary/emoji-in-sms (HTML). Generated by SMSMeteor from the same data as the page. Summary of the whole site: https://smsmeteor.com/llms.txt