Emoji are “The world’s fastest growing form of communication”. While women use emoji slightly more frequently than men, emoji use is use spread almost equally across age demographics.   Researchers at Harvard Business School, following research involving two studies and 1325 people (average age 33) reasoned that emoji can serve as a proxy for emotional expression in digital communication, due to their frequent usage among diverse age groups and populations and around the world. Nearly 3-in-4 Gen-Z respondents agreed that they find it easier to express their emotions using emoji.   In a survey conducted by Harris Poll and commissioned by GIF platform Tenor, 68% of millennials stated that they were “more comfortable” expressing emotions through emojis than through the written word.   "We suspect and suggest that emoji can serve as a novel and ubiquitous means for investigating the psychology of emotional expression at scale.” (Harvard Business School, 2018)   Users' understanding of the emotions communicated through various commonly-used emoji is also remarkably consistent. In these Harvard studies, 13 unique scenarios achieved at least 93 % emotional agreement between participants. And in 2017, a project spanning 1000 consumers in the USA and China across 5 surveys and 33 different emoji, found that when facial emoji replaced words in a questionnaire (product survey), the emotional data profiles on product preference were valid and repeatable.