How the “Nowruz Wheatgrass” grew its way into Twitter emojis?

3 min readApr 18, 2019

Emojis are like smiley’s but they have a difference. They visually represent any type of emotions by using images, signs, and almost any other shapes.

Twitter usually introduced new emojis for special occasions like valentine’s day, Christmas but when it came to Iranian national holidays, they didn’t do such a thing.

The whole story goes back to March 16th, 2016, when Mahdi Taghizadeh an Iranian user tweeted: “Wish Twitter had launched a hashflag for Nowruz.”

At the same time, Nima Akbarpour, another Iranian user tweeted: “I suggested that Twitter designs a hashflag emoji for Nowruz. They said it’s too late but promised me an official Happy Nowruz tweet on the Farsi Twitter page.”

After these requests, on the first day of the Iranian new year, the official Farsi Twitter page tweeted a Persian poem in celebration of Nowruz. Unfortunately, this page is no longer accessible.

Of course, this wasn’t going to stop Mahdi. Nearly a year later, on March 11th, 2017, he made a “Nowruz Wheatgrass” emoji and asked Jack Dorsey in a tweet: “Any chance to have a hashflag like this for Iranian new year between March 21st and 23rd?” while getting no reply.

But like they say, the third time’s the charm. On March 5th, 2018, Mahdi retweeted his last year’s post. This time he shifted his attention to the Iranians employees of Twitter (Omid Kordestani, Bijan Sabet, Keyvon Beykpour) and tweeted: “Our Iranian friends at Twitter, Can you help?” which only took 6 hours to get a response from Keyvon Beykpour. He mentioned Mahdi and wrote: “Will look into this and see what we can do.”