Prince William wasn’t afraid to get a little risqué during a recent radio interview.
The Prince of Wales appeared on BBC’s Radio 1 “Going Home” show on Tuesday while he and his wife, Kate Middleton, were in Birmingham to mark World Mental Health Day.
On the show, the prince and princess were asked about their most-used emoji.
William quipped that his was the aubergine ― likely better known to Americans as the eggplant.
“Is this a clean thing or is this a family one?” William said to laughs from hosts Jordan North and Vick Hope. “I’ve been told not to say the aubergine, so I’ve got to pick something else.”
“It would have been the aubergine but I’m saying now ― because I’ve got to be all grown up ― it’s the one where the eyes go up and down and the mouth’s out,” William continued.
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Kate had a much more reserved answer, saying that her emoji of choice was “the heart with then the crying emoji.”
“The sort of like ‘hysterical laughing’ when things have gone wrong,” the princess explained.
After the interview, the radio hosts were over the moon about William’s comments.
“He said the aubergine emoji, this is brilliant!” North said, while Hope joked the future king of England has “a dirty mind.”
Earlier on in the show, Hope had quipped to her co-host that “Prince William is dirtier than anything you’ve ever said.”
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Royal emoji use has made headlines in recent years. Back in 2020, authors Carolyn Durand and Omid Scobie revealed in their bombshell book about Prince Harry and Meghan Markle that the Duke of Sussex had one emoji he favored over others.
The authors reported in “Finding Freedom” that Harry’s texts “were often short and full of emojis, in particular the ghost emoji, which he often used instead of a smiley face.”
Though they don’t know why it was his favorite, they reported that “Meghan found his texting etiquette funny and adorable, just like the prince.”
Scobie, royal editor-at-large at Harper’s Bazaar, elaborated on his reporting in an interview with HuffPost, saying that “Harry obviously also had sort of a larger social media profile with his friends and they also were very familiar with his emoji habits.”
“So it was actually more than a few sources that we heard the same things from again,” he said.
“You know what I heard that was very funny about the ghost emoji is someone said that if you type in ‘boo’ on your iPhone, it turns into the ghost emoji,” said Scobie, who is also the author of the forthcoming royal book “Endgame.” “I would love to imagine Harry using the word ‘boo’ to describe Meghan, but I can’t see a world in which that happens.”