Cold Face Emoji
A blue, frozen face with gritted teeth and icicles, the counterpart to the hot face.
Try Cold Face emoji
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Meaning & usage
What does the Cold Face emoji mean?
A blue, frozen face with gritted teeth and icicles, the counterpart to the hot face.
Frozen and comic. It has none of the second reading its hot counterpart carries, which makes it the more straightforward of the pair.
How to use 🥶 naturally
Cold weather, unheated rooms and the first proper frost.
Face emoji usually carry more tone than literal information. Read them alongside the words, the relationship between the people, and whether the conversation is playful, formal or tense.
From standard to slang
The history of 🥶
- 2018
First defined as emoji
According to Unicode’s Emoji Versions data, Cold Face was first defined as emoji in Emoji 11.0, dated 2018. The first release under the current annual numbering.
- Before the keyboard
Its visual roots
A blue face with icicles and clenched teeth, drawn as the mirror of the hot face. Unlike its counterpart it has never picked up a figurative reading.
- Today
How its use evolved
Cold weather, unheated rooms and the first proper frost.
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.
Minus nine and the boiler is out 🥶
Waited twenty minutes for that bus 🥶
Office is an icebox 🥶
When to use it
Using 🥶 clearly
Cold weather, unheated rooms and the first proper frost. It lands as cold face emoji or 🥶 meaning 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 cold face emoji
What does 🥶 mean in a text message?
A blue, frozen face with gritted teeth and icicles, the counterpart to the hot face. Frozen and comic. It has none of the second reading its hot counterpart carries, which makes it the more straightforward of the pair.
Is 🥶 always positive?
Not always. Its usual readings are cold face emoji, 🥶 meaning, freezing emoji, and irony or the relationship between the people can flip any of them.
Why does 🥶 look different on another device?
U+1F976 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 cold face 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 cold face emoji introduced?
Unicode’s Emoji Versions data first records 🥶 as emoji in Emoji 11.0, dated 2018. 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.
Easily confused
🥶 compared with similar emoji
These sit close enough in meaning that people reach for the wrong one. Here is what actually separates them.
Cold Face or Hot Face?
The other half of the same pair. 🥶 stays literal about temperature, which makes it the safer of the two to send.
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+1F976 | 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 | \1F976 | For the content property. Keep the quotes around the whole value. | |
| JavaScript | \u{1F976} | A string-literal escape. Needs the u flag inside a regular expression. | |
| URL-encoded | %F0%9F%A5%B6 | Percent-encoded UTF-8, for query strings and API requests. |
Reference card
Emoji details
- Unicode
- U+1F976
- Category
- Smileys & Emotion
- Also known as
- cold face emoji🥶 meaningfreezing emoji
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