The essential form of you could be a green alien.”

“When we talk about letting you be the embodiment of your essential form, that doesn’t necessarily have to be literal. “These avatars are like your id, and that can take any form,” he said. Blackstock seemed to cut to the core of the Bitmoji experience.

When I asked why Bitmoji offers skin tones that don’t exist in real life - like fire engine red and robin’s egg blue - Mr. “The app is all about emotion, and it’s you, and you’re expressing all these emotions,” Mr. They didn’t disagree, but argued that Bitmoji was simply providing users with their essential self. Blackstock and his high school friend, Shahan Panth, who is Bitmoji’s co-founder and vice president for marketing: that the app’s appeal lies in its ability to offer us a more reductive version of ourselves, a more amiably goofy persona than we often present to the world. Over breakfast recently at Cafe Cluny in the West Village, I ran my hypothesis by Mr. It’s lightly mocking (the Bitmoji featuring you splayed face down on the ground holding an “I give up” sign, for instance, or the one with the sheepish shruggie shoulders), but it’s of our own choosing. They have over a half-billion shares between them, and have raised $11 million in funding.īut the true brilliance of Bitmoji, I think, is that whether we admit it or not, we often reduce the world around us (ourselves, our friends, our co-workers) into digestible, cartoonish caricatures: the lanky political flack with the wry smile the awkward best friend from high school, who comes alive during her “Like a Prayer” karaoke rendition or the balding colleague with a bit of facial scruff that says, “I may be 42, but I party like I’m 24.”Īnd now Bitmoji has done the heavy lifting for us, marrying our own sense of self with our public image, yet in a safe, quirky way that we ultimately control. The app was introduced in the iTunes store and in Google Play in October 2014, and its earlier incarnation was called Bitstrips. Bitmoji, which has won converts like Lena Dunham, Seth Rogen and Victoria Beckham, is the brainchild of Jacob Blackstock, a 39-year-old Canadian who started as a cartoonist and animator and goes by the nickname Ba.

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