Posted by Darren Lewis, Software Engineer

For a short period of time after launching emoticons for mail, we believed we had successfully captured the entirety of human expression in 19 faces (we're still debating whether the robot face counts), important representatives of the animal kingdom such as and , emoticons for both love () and heartbreak (), and, well, a pile of .

But soon a growing feeling of dread overcame the group . How could we have included a but not a cat? What if I want wine rather than ?

And thus was born a new Labs feature: extra emoji, the colorfully animated brainchild of our team in Japan. Simply go to the Labs tab under Settings, enable "Extra Emoji," and have that glass of you've been dreaming about. Ask your in-laws about the fluffiness factor of their pet . Become a meteorologist and start predicting . Dance like you mean it . Then let us know what you think.

(If you're wondering how we had time to create another couple hundred emoticons when we're busy doing important stuff like rewriting Gmail for mobile and making Gmail work offline, the answer is: we didn't. All of these extra emoticons are straight from the secret underground labs of some of the top Japanese mobile carriers, used with permission. Thanks guys!)