Grimacing Face Emoji
Clenched teeth and a stiff smile: awkwardness, held-in panic or the face you make after a mistake.
Try Grimacing Face emoji
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Meaning & usage
What does the Grimacing Face emoji mean?
Clenched teeth and a stiff smile: awkwardness, held-in panic or the face you make after a mistake.
Tense and apologetic. It usually accompanies bad news or an admitted mistake, and its awkwardness is what stops the message sounding careless.
How to use 😬 naturally
Bad news, social misfires and the moment you realise you replied to everyone.
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 😬
- 2015
First defined as emoji
According to Unicode’s Emoji Versions data, Grimacing Face was first defined as emoji in Emoji 1.0, dated 2015. The first release where Unicode versioned the emoji set as a standard in its own right.
- Before the keyboard
Its visual roots
A full set of clenched teeth with the eyes wide. The bared teeth are not a smile, which is why it works for awkwardness rather than pleasure.
- Today
How its use evolved
Bad news, social misfires and the moment you realise you replied to everyone.
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.
I think I replied to the whole list 😬
Told her about the party. She didn't know 😬
Might have broken the build 😬
When to use it
Using 😬 clearly
Bad news, social misfires and the moment you realise you replied to everyone. It lands as grimacing face meaning or awkward 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 grimacing face emoji
What does 😬 mean in a text message?
Clenched teeth and a stiff smile: awkwardness, held-in panic or the face you make after a mistake. Tense and apologetic. It usually accompanies bad news or an admitted mistake, and its awkwardness is what stops the message sounding careless.
Is 😬 always positive?
Not always. Its usual readings are grimacing face meaning, awkward emoji, cringe emoji face, and irony or the relationship between the people can flip any of them.
Why does 😬 look different on another device?
U+1F62C 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 grimacing 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 grimacing face emoji introduced?
Unicode’s Emoji Versions data first records 😬 as emoji in Emoji 1.0, dated 2015. 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+1F62C | 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 | \1F62C | For the content property. Keep the quotes around the whole value. | |
| JavaScript | \u{1F62C} | A string-literal escape. Needs the u flag inside a regular expression. | |
| URL-encoded | %F0%9F%98%AC | Percent-encoded UTF-8, for query strings and API requests. |
Reference card
Emoji details
- Unicode
- U+1F62C
- Category
- Smileys & Emotion
- Also known as
- grimacing face meaningawkward emojicringe emoji face
Put it in a message
When 😬 is the right choice
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