Face with Medical Mask Emoji
A surgical mask over a neutral face, meaning illness, caution or avoiding contagion.
Try Face with Medical Mask emoji
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Meaning & usage
What does the Face with Medical Mask emoji mean?
A surgical mask over a neutral face, meaning illness, caution or avoiding contagion.
Practical and slightly withdrawn. Its meaning shifted after 2020: it now reads as caution about others as often as illness in the sender.
How to use 😷 naturally
Being unwell, taking precautions and jokes about avoiding people.
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 😷
- 2010
First defined as emoji
According to Unicode’s Emoji Versions data, Face with Medical Mask was first defined as emoji in Emoji 0.6, dated 2010. That label is retrospective: Unicode applied it later to the early mobile core it inherited from the Japanese carriers.
- Before the keyboard
Its visual roots
A surgical mask over the lower face. Common in Japan long before 2020 as ordinary courtesy when unwell, which is why it existed in the earliest sets.
- Today
How its use evolved
Being unwell, taking precautions and jokes about avoiding people.
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.
Working from home, streaming with a cold 😷
Third one this month 😷
Masked up on the train 😷
When to use it
Using 😷 clearly
Being unwell, taking precautions and jokes about avoiding people. It lands as face with medical mask 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 face with medical mask emoji
What does 😷 mean in a text message?
A surgical mask over a neutral face, meaning illness, caution or avoiding contagion. Practical and slightly withdrawn. Its meaning shifted after 2020: it now reads as caution about others as often as illness in the sender.
Is 😷 always positive?
Not always. Its usual readings are face with medical mask, 😷 meaning, mask emoji, and irony or the relationship between the people can flip any of them.
Why does 😷 look different on another device?
U+1F637 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 face with medical mask 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 face with medical mask emoji introduced?
Unicode’s Emoji Versions data first records 😷 as emoji in Emoji 0.6, dated 2010. 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.
Face with Medical Mask or Face with Thermometer?
🤒 says you are ill. 😷 can mean that, or that you are being careful around other people, which is why it is the more ambiguous of the two.
Face with Medical Mask or Nauseated Face?
🤢 is a symptom. 😷 is a precaution, and the mask says nothing about how you actually feel.
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+1F637 | 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 | \1F637 | For the content property. Keep the quotes around the whole value. | |
| JavaScript | \u{1F637} | A string-literal escape. Needs the u flag inside a regular expression. | |
| URL-encoded | %F0%9F%98%B7 | Percent-encoded UTF-8, for query strings and API requests. |
Reference card
Emoji details
- Unicode
- U+1F637
- Category
- Smileys & Emotion
- Also known as
- face with medical mask😷 meaningmask emoji
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