I’ve spent the past few weeks deep in the world of Genmoji, creating hundreds and hundreds of different Genmoji by exploring just what’s possible. I’ve taken everything I’ve learned and put it into these 12 top tips to help you get the most out of this exciting new tool.

In this short video, I’m going to run through my 12 top tips for creating perfect Genmoji, including the prompts you just have to use immediately, some ways to really fine-tune your results, and how to share these cute little creations as high-resolution images to use anywhere you’d like. And if your phone doesn’t support Apple Intelligence, don’t worry—there’s a clever way to use all of these Genmoji characters on older devices too, which I’ll share with you later on.

Let’s get into business. First up, the best Genmoji come from the simplest descriptive prompts. Don’t get wordy; don’t try and over-describe—just keep it simple. Use as many keywords as you’d like, but don’t faff around with huge descriptions and full sentences. Here, you’ll see that “takeaway coffee creature legs” works better than “a takeaway cup of coffee which has grown legs and is smiling at me,” and it creates this really rather adorable caffeinated critter. I have a feeling I’m going to be drinking quite a few of these as I make this video.

Swiping sideways through the Genmoji that have been created means I can choose the perfect one for my message. And when I’ve found it, I can either tap “Add” to put it straight into my iMessage, or I can press the three dots and select “Save to Stickers” to save this one for later whilst I keep generating more. Any Genmoji you send is automatically added to your library as well, so you don’t need to save every sticker every time you make one.

It’s also worth mentioning here that Genmoji doesn’t respond well to brands or companies. So, putting a Starbucks coffee cup in here isn’t going to work, and it will simply give you no results. Work around this by adding in colours and details that represent the brand without mentioning the brand name itself. So, don’t type “Starbucks takeaway coffee,” but do try “white takeaway coffee cardboard slip with green circle logo,” and you’ll get something a little bit closer to what you had in mind.

Speaking of colour, another great use I’ve found for Genmoji is to create my own aesthetic emoji based on a particular colour palette. Specify your colours first—for example, “pale pastel pink”—and then type the emoji you want to create, such as “gift box.” This then creates a series of options, and I can swipe sideways to pick the one that best fits my aesthetic.

Sometimes the colours get missed on the Genmoji, but because it keeps generating until you’re happy, it’s always worth swiping sideways until you find what you want. If not, just refine that prompt slightly. For example, I found that “pale pink” made really vibrant pink emoji, whereas “pale pastel pink” made much softer colours. There’s, of course, an element of trial and error here, but as soon as you find a colour instruction that works, you can make as many themed emoji as you want. I’ve seen so many people sharing their own custom-coloured emoji online. What’s your favourite style at the moment that you’ve been creating? Let me know in the comments!

Of course, you aren’t just limited to recolouring emoji. You can also combine, edit, and recreate them to make them that much more personal, relevant, or meaningful to you and your friends. Say I want to create a more complex Genmoji of a dinosaur having a snowball fight—a perfectly normal and not at all weird idea! There are lots of ways I could describe what I want to see, but I’ve found that just taking it one step at a time helps generate the perfect results, as you can adapt your description as you go.

I’m going to start with the prompt “dinosaur red jumper,” and immediately I can see that it’s also trying to make me a red dinosaur. I’ll change it to “blue dinosaur red jumper,” and yes, that’s much better. Let’s add some snow in now: “blue dinosaur red jumper snow,” and you can see that my dinosaur is standing in a little patch of snow. Lastly, I want to add in that snowball fight element I mentioned, so let’s add one extra step to our prompt to make it perfect: “blue dinosaur red jumper snow throwing snowball.”

As you can see, a lot of those results are contained in square boxes like photos, and that seems to be a limitation you’ll run into when you create more complex Genmoji. Altering the prompt, though, can help you get better results. In this case, removing the word “throwing” and replacing it with “fight” immediately gives me much more emoji-like images.

Whilst Genmoji creations tend to look just like real emoji, sometimes you want to create something that stands out a bit and really has that wow factor. In my testing, I found one particularly descriptive word that does this in a myriad of ways, but it’s perhaps not one you’d immediately think of. My favourite word to use in Genmoji descriptions is actually explosion.

Don’t panic—I’m not up to anything bad, dodgy, or illegal! But that prompt seems to make Genmoji come alive in a whole bunch of interesting ways. Whether it’s gold sparkles, a starburst effect, confetti, or a ball of fire in the background, adding the word “explosion” takes your Genmoji up a level or two in terms of energy and excitement.

Take a look at these two examples: “Spring flower cake” creates a lovely-looking cake, but it’s a very static and lifeless image. “Spring flower cake explosion” creates much more dynamic and fun results, like these.

Yes, you’ll probably get one or two cakes that are on fire, but keep scrolling and you’ll see a whole bunch of lively Genmoji with explosions of colour or flowers, just like these.

I think this works because of the fairly strict guardrails Apple have put in place to stop you from making illegal or inappropriate images with their tools. It seems to interpret the word “explosion” as more of a deliberate graphical style, rather than the act of making something explode. It’s more like an explosion of colour, an explosion of energy—that sort of thing.

Another thing I’ve found really fun is creating collections of Genmoji based around a similar theme. You see this a lot with regular emoji, where there are several types of cars or multiple versions of a notebook in different colours. So, why don’t we create our own collections of Genmoji?

For this example, I’m going to create a group of Genmoji to share what I’m currently watching on TV. Let’s start with a description of a simple television by typing in “black television.” I can then press the three dots and save it to Stickers. Now, I’ll refine my prompt to change what’s on the TV screen by adding “dinosaur channel” to the end. I could have typed “a black television with dinosaurs on the screen,” but that tends to create televisions with dinosaurs standing on top. As I said earlier, keep those descriptions simple with just a few keywords to get the best results.

Scrolling through a bit, I love this Genmoji, so again I’ll save it by tapping the three dots. Next, I want one for a sci-fi show, so I’ll change the prompt to “space channel.” Again, I can save my favourite and keep going: “medical channel,” “weather channel,” and so on.

I’ve seen some people create really fun sets of Genmoji like this, from holographic trading cards to cuddly toys, each adding a personal spin to the traditional emoji sets.

Up until now, we’ve been creating Genmoji from our own imagination and the existing library of emoji. I think it’s time to start making these much, much more personal. So, next, we’re going to dive into using our own friends and family in our Genmoji.

But before we do that, please do give this video a like if you’re enjoying it so far. As a small YouTuber, it really helps my videos get seen more widely and, to be honest, encourages me to keep creating useful resources like this.

Right, now we’ve mastered the basics, let’s get a bit more personal and include some of our friends and family in our Genmoji. Using faces that have been tagged in the Photos app, Genmoji is able to recognise your contacts by simply typing their name into the “Describe an emoji” box.

For instance, typing in “Jacob Top Hat” immediately creates this Genmoji wearing a very fancy hat, and the person is a pretty decent likeness to myself! It even shows underneath the person from your photo library that the Genmoji is based on. Tapping on their name lets you quickly switch to another person without losing the rest of your prompt. Now my whole family can be looking extra dapper in their top hats!

It’s worth bearing in mind that, right now, you can’t have two different contacts in a single Genmoji. For instance, I couldn’t create one emoji featuring both myself and my wife. Instead, you’d need to make both people individually and then send them as two separate emoji if that’s something you want.

You can, however, use the prompt to customise how the people appear. For example, you can specify clothing styles and colours, as well as state the actions and emotions your characters should be doing. Here’s me looking scared, excited, tired, and drinking one of those coffees I mentioned earlier.

Notice how these prompts don’t say “Jacob feeling tired” but rather “Jacob sleepy pyjamas.” You see, Genmoji works best when you describe what you can see in the image, rather than the emotion or mood the image is meant to portray. Always be literal in your descriptions to get the best results.

Next, I want to share how we can make those friends and family members look more accurate in our Genmoji, because quite frankly, sometimes they can look terrible. You see, it’s all down to the starting image that’s chosen to base that face off of. But luckily, we can change this easily.

Here, I’ve got myself again, but this time I’m at the beach. The biggest giveaway here is that I can’t surf! But perhaps I’ve decided that the face here doesn’t really look much like me either. To fix that, I’m going to tap on where it’s recognised the person from the Photos app, and then tap on “Edit” underneath my picture.

Here, my iPhone will give me a selection of different options that I can quickly swipe through to try and find a character that looks a bit more like me. It’s quite tricky to see, but in the bottom left corner of each is the photograph that these characters were based on. Hopefully, at this stage, I’ll find one that looks way better, and I can get back to creating more Genmoji.

But if none of them are quite what you’re looking for, you can tap on “Choose Other Photo” at the bottom, and then pick any photo of that person from your library. Try and choose one with good lighting and that’s in clear focus, as these work best from my testing. Once I’ve chosen one, I can then see the Genmoji based on that image. If I’m happy, I press “Done.” If not, I just repeat the process until I am.

Now that we’ve fine-tuned that AI model, any Genmoji I create using that particular person will be based on the version I’ve just chosen, which should make them look far more like the person they’re meant to represent.

You don’t have to use people you know as starting points for your custom emoji. In fact, you can take existing generic emoji characters and use them instead. Simply type “person” into the “Describe an emoji” box and then tap “Choose a Person.” This will bring up that contact picker from earlier, but this time, you’re just going to select the first option with the greyed-out face simply called “Emoji.”

Here, you can pick a female, male, or gender-neutral face, and you can also specify your desired skin tone. I’ll select the female face with a light skin tone. You can now see straight away that this person is one of the standard iOS emoji characters, but I can use that as a starting point to create something new without having to write my own description to begin with.

I’ll press “Done,” and then I can use this character in my prompt simply by typing “person” at the start. For example, I’ll ask for “person black shirt bright pink heart glasses,” and you’ll see it’s used that emoji person we chose as a starting point rather than any of my contacts.

We can change this emoji person at any time we like, giving us endless possibilities for making our own characters in Genmoji.

Another really fun way to use Genmoji is to create images of your pets and beloved animals in different situations. However, unlike the Photos app, which can categorise and tag animals, Genmoji can’t currently create images based on your actual pets.

While this means that you can’t simply select your cat or dog and get started, you can still create really fun emoji by simply describing your pet instead. For example, I can create one of our family dogs, Poppy, by typing in how she looks. Simply using the description “golden Labrador” gets me pretty close, and from there I can start improving and adding to my description in whichever ways I like—perhaps by giving her a cute little bow tie on her collar. Perfect!

Now, there are a couple of other things I want to share with you to help you get the most out of your Genmoji experience, including how to use them on older devices that don’t support Apple Intelligence. But before we do, if you’ve made it this far into the video, then I’m guessing you’ve probably enjoyed it—I hope so, anyway! And you know what? There are hundreds more Quick Tips just like this on my channel down below. So, perhaps when this video is finished, you might go there next and see what else your iPhone can do that you didn’t know about.

Okay, so by this point, we’ve created dozens, if not hundreds, of Genmoji, and we need to think about how we can find them in the future. Well, the good news is that Apple makes it really easy to search for them because they show up alongside all your other emoji when you search on the emoji keyboard.

That means I can search for the words I used to create the Genmoji, and they’ll appear there, ready to use straight away. I can also type in the names of the people they were based on to filter by specific family and friends. What’s more, if you like to be really organised, you can actually add extra search terms to make finding them easier in the future.

When you’re on the creation screen, tap those three dots to bring up the options menu. From here, select “Add Caption.” The text you type here is used for screen readers and VoiceOver tools, but it’s also the text used in search to help you find your images later.

Typing in a caption not only helps people with visual impairments or those who have messages read aloud through Siri to enjoy your Genmoji, but it also makes them far easier for you to find in the future. It’s a win-win!

Of course, by default, emoji appear very small in an iMessage thread, but there have already been several times when I’ve wanted to get a larger version of one of the images I’ve created. Obviously, you can see a slightly larger version on the screen where you first create the Genmoji, but once you’ve left that screen, you can’t go back to it in Messages.

Well, there’s a sneaky workaround here. All you need to do is open another app that handles text, like Pages, and insert the Genmoji into a blank document. When I tap on the keyboard and choose the Genmoji I want, straight away you’ll see it treats that Genmoji like a traditional image, rather than an emoji that shows up in line with the text.

This means I can use the dots in the corner to make it bigger or smaller and move it freely around my page. From here, you can either export the whole page as an image, or—perhaps even easier—you can zoom in to the part you want on the screen and take a screenshot. Quickly crop away anything you don’t need, save it to the Photos app, and voilà—it’s now a far higher resolution image than before, ready to be used anywhere you like.

Okay, I know there are going to be a lot of people watching this who can’t access Genmoji on their devices because they don’t support Apple Intelligence for various reasons. For all of you, I want to share one incredibly useful tip that means you can still save any and all Genmoji to your own emoji library, even without Apple Intelligence.

When you receive a Genmoji in a message, all you need to do is long-press on it. From the options bar that appears, select Emoji Details. Here, you’ll see each Genmoji in the message, and you can press the Download button on the right-hand side to add it to your own emoji library.

If you don’t see this option, double-check that your device is updated to iOS 18 or later. This means you can borrow a friend’s device, create your own Genmoji, and then simply message them to yourself. From there, you can save them and use them as many times as you like. It’s not ideal, but it does mean you can still take part in the Genmoji fun on your own device!

And that brings me to the end of my 12 top tips for Genmoji. I hope you found this video useful and informative. Drop me a comment down below with your favourite Genmoji tip—or perhaps there’s something you’re doing that I haven’t covered here. Let us know in the comments so we can all make even better Genmoji going forwards!