In this essay, we briefly discuss recent developments, started a decade ago in the seminal work of Smirnov and continued by a number of authors, centered around the conformal invariance of the critical planar Ising model on Z 2 and, more generally, of the critical Z-invariant Ising model on isoradial graphs (rhombic lattices). We also introduce a new class of embeddings of general weighted planar graphs (s-embeddings), which might, in particular, pave the way to true universality results for the planar Ising model.2010 Mathematics Subject Classification. Primary 82B20; Secondary 30G25, 60J67, 81T40.