Try Butterfly emoji
Edit the text, then change the size.
Meaning & usage
What does the Butterfly emoji mean?
Transformation, beauty and delicate change.
Delicate beauty and positive transformation. It commonly appears in growth, recovery and spring-themed posts, where it creates a soft tone.
How to use 🦋 naturally
Growth posts and soft aesthetics.
Animal emoji can be literal, affectionate or symbolic. People often use them for pets and wildlife, but also for personality traits, visual themes and private nicknames.
From standard to slang
The history of 🦋
- 2016
First defined as emoji
According to Unicode’s Emoji Versions data, Butterfly was first defined as emoji in Emoji 3.0, dated 2016. Part of the rapid mid-decade expansion beyond the original mobile set.
- Before the keyboard
Its visual roots
A butterfly seen from above with symmetrical wings, added in 2016. It is one of the few insects in the set drawn from a decorative angle rather than a naturalistic one.
- Today
How its use evolved
Growth posts and soft aesthetics.
Dates follow Unicode’s official Emoji Versions chart. Versions before Emoji 1.0 are labelled retrospectively. See the history of emoji.
In conversation
Examples of 🦋 in messages
These examples show the emoji in complete messages, where the words make its intended tone easier to read.
A lot can change in one year 🦋
The garden is full of butterflies 🦋
Starting a softer new chapter 🦋
When to use it
Using 🦋 clearly
Growth posts and soft aesthetics. It lands as change or beauty when the rest of the message supports that reading, and it is the surrounding words that do the deciding — so in a sensitive, professional or cross-cultural conversation, say the thing outright as well.
Common questions
About the butterfly emoji
What does 🦋 mean in a text message?
Transformation, beauty and delicate change. Delicate beauty and positive transformation. It commonly appears in growth, recovery and spring-themed posts, where it creates a soft tone.
Is 🦋 always positive?
Not always. Its usual readings are change, beauty, insect, and irony or the relationship between the people can flip any of them.
Why does 🦋 look different on another device?
U+1F98B identifies the emoji; the picture is a font, drawn separately by Apple, Google, Microsoft and Samsung. Only the artwork changes, never the character.
How do I copy and paste the butterfly emoji?
Use the copy button at the top of this page. 🦋 is a character, not an image, so it pastes into messages, captions and filenames as ordinary text.
When was the butterfly emoji introduced?
Unicode’s Emoji Versions data first records 🦋 as emoji in Emoji 3.0, dated 2016. Early emoji version numbers can be retrospective, so this date describes its place in the standardised emoji set rather than the first-ever appearance of the underlying symbol.
For developers
🦋 in code
Every value below is generated from the character itself, so it stays correct even where a file encoding cannot hold the emoji directly.
| Format | Value | When to use it | Copy |
|---|---|---|---|
| Unicode | U+1F98B | The standard reference. Use it to search a character map or a spec. | |
| HTML (hex) | 🦋 | For HTML and XML. Safe in files that are not saved as UTF-8. | |
| HTML (decimal) | 🦋 | The same reference in decimal. Both render identically. | |
| CSS | \1F98B | For the content property. Keep the quotes around the whole value. | |
| JavaScript | \u{1F98B} | A string-literal escape. Needs the u flag inside a regular expression. | |
| URL-encoded | %F0%9F%A6%8B | Percent-encoded UTF-8, for query strings and API requests. |
Reference card
Emoji details
- Unicode
- U+1F98B
- Category
- Animals & Nature Life
- Also known as
- changebeautyinsect
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