Flushed Face Emoji
Wide eyes and hot cheeks — caught off guard, embarrassed or startled by something forward.
Try Flushed Face emoji
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Meaning & usage
What does the Flushed Face emoji mean?
Wide eyes and hot cheeks — caught off guard, embarrassed or startled by something forward.
Startled and self-conscious. It can be shy, flattered or scandalised, and the surrounding message decides which, so it is easy to misread on its own.
How to use 😳 naturally
Surprises, compliments that land too hard and messages you did not expect to receive.
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, Flushed Face 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
Wide eyes over reddened cheeks. Blushing is one of the few involuntary reactions the emoji set depicts, which is why it works for being caught out.
- Today
How its use evolved
Surprises, compliments that land too hard and messages you did not expect to receive.
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.
He actually said it out loud 😳
That is a lot more than I expected 😳
She read the whole message aloud 😳
When to use it
Using 😳 clearly
Surprises, compliments that land too hard and messages you did not expect to receive. It lands as flushed face meaning or blushing emoji 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 flushed face emoji
What does 😳 mean in a text message?
Wide eyes and hot cheeks — caught off guard, embarrassed or startled by something forward. Startled and self-conscious. It can be shy, flattered or scandalised, and the surrounding message decides which, so it is easy to misread on its own.
Is 😳 always positive?
Not always. Its usual readings are flushed face meaning, blushing emoji, embarrassed emoji, and irony or the relationship between the people can flip any of them.
Why does 😳 look different on another device?
U+1F633 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 flushed 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 flushed face 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.
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+1F633 | 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 | \1F633 | For the content property. Keep the quotes around the whole value. | |
| JavaScript | \u{1F633} | A string-literal escape. Needs the u flag inside a regular expression. | |
| URL-encoded | %F0%9F%98%B3 | Percent-encoded UTF-8, for query strings and API requests. |
Reference card
Emoji details
- Unicode
- U+1F633
- Category
- Smileys & Emotion
- Also known as
- flushed face meaningblushing emojiembarrassed emoji
Put it in a message
When 😳 is the right choice
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