Face with Peeking Eye Emoji
Hands over the face with one eye looking through — watching something you can barely watch.
Try Face with Peeking Eye emoji
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Meaning & usage
What does the Face with Peeking Eye emoji mean?
Hands over the face with one eye looking through — watching something you can barely watch.
Braced for something. It captures watching through your fingers, which makes it the natural reaction to secondhand embarrassment.
How to use 🫣 naturally
Cringing at a video, checking a result and reacting to secondhand embarrassment.
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 🫣
- 2021
First defined as emoji
According to Unicode’s Emoji Versions data, Face with Peeking Eye was first defined as emoji in Emoji 14.0, dated 2021. A release whose additions were quickly adopted as reactions.
- Before the keyboard
Its visual roots
Two hands over the face with one eye escaping between the fingers. It is the exact posture of watching something you cannot bear to watch.
- Today
How its use evolved
Cringing at a video, checking a result and reacting to secondhand embarrassment.
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.
Checking my results now 🫣
He is doing karaoke unprompted 🫣
Opened the credit card statement 🫣
When to use it
Using 🫣 clearly
Cringing at a video, checking a result and reacting to secondhand embarrassment. It lands as face with peeking eye 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 peeking eye emoji
What does 🫣 mean in a text message?
Hands over the face with one eye looking through — watching something you can barely watch. Braced for something. It captures watching through your fingers, which makes it the natural reaction to secondhand embarrassment.
Is 🫣 always positive?
Not always. Its usual readings are face with peeking eye, 🫣 meaning, peeking emoji, and irony or the relationship between the people can flip any of them.
Why does 🫣 look different on another device?
U+1FAE3 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 peeking eye 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 peeking eye emoji introduced?
Unicode’s Emoji Versions data first records 🫣 as emoji in Emoji 14.0, dated 2021. 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+1FAE3 | 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 | \1FAE3 | For the content property. Keep the quotes around the whole value. | |
| JavaScript | \u{1FAE3} | A string-literal escape. Needs the u flag inside a regular expression. | |
| URL-encoded | %F0%9F%AB%A3 | Percent-encoded UTF-8, for query strings and API requests. |
Reference card
Emoji details
- Unicode
- U+1FAE3
- Category
- Smileys & Emotion
- Also known as
- face with peeking eye🫣 meaningpeeking emoji
Put it in a message
When 🫣 is the right choice
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