What I learned from a weekend of konversation with Kim Kardashian’s Kimojis

In the imaginary behind-the-scenes version of Keeping Up With the Kardashians that plays on a loop in the background of my mind at all times, I imagine Kim Kardashian waking up. Her hair is perfectly splayed out on a pillow and she’s wearing all silk. She rolls over and looks over North’s adorable head to look at her husband, Kanye. He’s awake. He’s sleepy and yawns a little before asking her gently, “What will we do today, Kim?”

And Kim pats his soft head. Her eyes narrow. Her plush lips part gently as if to kiss him, or the air, or both, and she whispers:

“Try to take over the world.”

A little over a week ago one of those pillow conversations became a reality when Kim Kardashian West released “Kimoji,” a phone app featuring 250-plus icons ranging from bottles of champagne on ice to corset emojis. In the moment before its release Kim’s power swelled. She alerted her fans on Twitter that the Kimoji were coming, and so many of them tried to download the app so quickly that they broke the app store.

In my day-to-day conversations, I don’t use a wide variety of emoji. Normally, I only ever need the smiling devil emoji ( ) and the party emoji ( ). Somewhat frequently, I use the heart eye emoji ( ) and the nail emoji ( ), but everything else I use pretty rarely. Did I really need another emoji app? What did I even need a frosted peach emoji for, anyway? What on earth would I use a page full of giant Kim Kardashian head emojis for?

Turns out, everything.

I downloaded Kimoji on Wednesday—two days after its release in the app store—because I saw that there was a Kimoji for a bottle of tequila. This is an emoji I would like to use. I also expected to like the Kimoji app because I really liked Kim’s first app “Kim Kardashian: Hollywood,” a first-person iPhone game where you try to help your character become A-list famous like Kim Kardashian. It is an addicting game and a good product. One I played far too much in 2014 and accidentally spent a fair amount of money on.

Playing “Kim Kardashian: Hollywood” taught me that, though the Kardashians care about quality of product, they also plan to make money off their product. Upfront, the Kimoji app will cost you $1.99 in the App Store. According to the NY Post, early reports had more than 9,000 people downloading the app per second, meaning, “at that rate, Kim’s Kimoji was grossing about $1 million a minute.”

I gave Kim Kardashian my two dollars.

Like the other emoji app, you use Kimoji as a secondary keyboard, which means you have to install it in your settings and then you get to the pics by tapping the little globe thingy in the bottom lefthand corner of your keyboard.

Unlike regular emoji, though, the Kimoji are not “characters “that exist in a “keyboard,” which is to say you cannot type them. The screenshot above shows you what the Kimoji look like on your phone. Looking at this, you would think, “I will just click on those images of crowns and sports bras and corsets and they will type into my box just like normal letters will!” You are wrong. This is not how Kimoji works.

Kimoji are actually a collection of images that you are copying into your text bar. So when you click on a Kimoji, it tells you to paste it into your box, and then you can send it. This works most of the time, except for the some of the time that it pastes an old Kimoji into your box and you send your friend “sexy Santa Kimoji” instead of “devil-horned Kim.”

Whoops.

Kimoji come in two forms: small and giant. Both forms are bigger than a normal emoji that you might send, but the giant Kimoji are really giant. They fill about three texts’ worth of size on an iPhone and almost all of them are of Kim’s giant face. People really love to be sent many of these giant Kim stickers in a row.

Most people were confused when I sent them the giant Kim heads. My friend Olivia thought that these were emojis of me with brown hair and brown eyes, which while very wrong is maybe the nicest compliment anyone has ever bestowed on me. Several people asked me “what are these!?” to which I would respond “Kim head with angel halo.” Even the iPhone was a little confused, often correcting “Kimoji” to “kimono.”

In fact, the only person who understood my giant Kim K heads was my younger sister, Shelby, who has been a devout follower of the Kardashian enterprise since the premiere of their show Keeping Up with the Kardashians. Shelby was the only one who truly appreciated my Kimoji.

This might be because Kimoji is a “language,” and one with a bit of a literacy problem. A few of the emoji in the Kimoji set are deep cuts from the Kardashian family show. Take the Kimoji of Kim crying, for example, which has a storied KUWTK history.

My sister, of course, thought this Kimoji was very funny and immediately began using it in our family group text.

The smaller Kimoji should, in theory, be more versatile than the larger Kimoji for conversing. There is a much greater range of options in the smaller images, and so many ways that they could be used to create jokes via text. One Kimoji with serious potential is the small head of Jesus Christ. Other high-potential Kimoji include the many, many sext Kimojis and the middle finger Kimoji.

Really the only true downfall of the Kimoji app is that you have to paste the image you want into the text field. This is time consuming, and it slows down how quickly you could use the emoji in your conversations. There were times when I could have and would have used a Kimoji in my conversation, but chose not to just because of the effort it would have taken.

What makes the small Kimoji so great is that they are marketed to a very specific audience (mostly young women who watch the Kardashians), which means that they are far more useful in my conversations than the normal emoji. While I have absolutely no use for 17 different car emojis or 20 random building emoji, I can think of so many uses for the 8 different money emojis Kimoji offers.

The Kimoji are exactly what emoji should be: completely and utterly absurd. They are not good in a serious conversation, or even one where you’re expected to provide a coherent answer. But if your mom asks you what you want to do Christmas evening, the Kimoji make for a damn good troll.