It started late last year. I began to notice cartoon strips appearing in my Facebook newsfeed that definitely weren’t from the hand of Zapiro. Upon further inspection, it seemed that the cartoons actually starred the people who were posting them.

Like everybody else I thought, 'How cool!' and immediately signed up for Bitstrips, the viral cartoon craze that swept across Facebook like a tsunami. It grew so popular at one point that there were actually Bitstrips hate groups popping up all over the place. But like every viral tsunami before, the wave eventually broke and an entire day can now go by without a Bitstrips appearing in my newsfeed.



They’re back and they’re you!



Then I spotted that the Bitstrips developers had launched Bitmoji, a customisable emoji sharing app. Instead of just replicating the Facebook version of Bitstrips and letting you create comic strips starring you and your friends, the developers cleverly adjusted their sights and the new app allows you to create emoji starring none other than yourself.

Basically, you just have to create an avatar in your image using different hair styles, face shapes, eye colours, jawlines and all the other things that make you, well, you.

All your moods are covered

Once you’ve created the cartoon version of yourself it is automatically placed in a wide variety of expressive emoji that are split into sections based on moods: from happy, to sad, to loving, to funny and more. 

And those you use the most are handily kept in a Popular folder for ease of access. But if, like me, you have more moods in a day than stars in the night sky, you’ll find a Bitmoji to suit your frame of mind no matter what you’re thinking.



Embed Bitmoji you into your digital life


Perhaps the cleverest bit in the app is that you can turn on your Bitmoji as a keyboard so you can access it from any other app you might want to use to send a message. Or you can send to Facebook, WeChat and WhatsApp from inside the Bitmoji app too. Even if you are using some weird left-field app that doesn’t support the Bitmoji keyboard, you can save them to your camera roll and access them from there.



Starting a craze, baby, starting a craze



I’m absolutely loving Bitmoji and seem to have sparked a craze among my family and friends. Their standard response to receiving their first Bitmoji Steve was: 'How did you do that and can I do it too?' 

The answer is, 'Yes you can!' and all you have to do is hit the appropriate link below.

Get Bitmoji


Go to the Bitmoji website  

Download Bitmoji for Apple 

Download Bitmoji for Android