Person Facepalming Emoji
A hand to the face in disbelief, exasperation or second-hand embarrassment.
Try Person Facepalming emoji
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Meaning & usage
What does the Person Facepalming emoji mean?
A hand to the face in disbelief, exasperation or second-hand embarrassment.
Exasperated but usually fond. It works best when the mistake is small and the person can laugh at it too.
How to use 🤦 naturally
Obvious mistakes, repeated errors and moments too silly to answer properly.
Hand gestures can be direct and efficient, which makes them useful in quick replies. Their tone varies across cultures and age groups, so a short accompanying phrase can prevent ambiguity.
From standard to slang
The history of 🤦
- 2016
First defined as emoji
According to Unicode’s Emoji Versions data, Person Facepalming was first defined as emoji in Emoji 3.0, dated 2016. Part of the rapid mid-decade expansion beyond the original mobile set.
- Before the keyboard
Its visual roots
A hand covering the face, from the frustration gesture that spread through internet culture before the emoji existed to encode it.
- Today
How its use evolved
Obvious mistakes, repeated errors and moments too silly to answer properly.
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.
Locked myself out again 🤦
Sent it to the wrong client 🤦
Read the whole thing, then noticed the date 🤦
When to use it
Using 🤦 clearly
Obvious mistakes, repeated errors and moments too silly to answer properly. It lands as facepalm emoji meaning 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 person facepalming emoji
What does 🤦 mean in a text message?
A hand to the face in disbelief, exasperation or second-hand embarrassment. Exasperated but usually fond. It works best when the mistake is small and the person can laugh at it too.
Is 🤦 always positive?
Not always. Its usual readings are facepalm emoji meaning, 🤦 meaning, person facepalming, and irony or the relationship between the people can flip any of them.
Why does 🤦 look different on another device?
U+1F926 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 person facepalming 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 person facepalming emoji introduced?
Unicode’s Emoji Versions data first records 🤦 as emoji in Emoji 3.0, dated 2016. 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+1F926 | 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 | \1F926 | For the content property. Keep the quotes around the whole value. | |
| JavaScript | \u{1F926} | A string-literal escape. Needs the u flag inside a regular expression. | |
| URL-encoded | %F0%9F%A4%A6 | Percent-encoded UTF-8, for query strings and API requests. |
Reference card
Emoji details
- Unicode
- U+1F926
- Category
- Hands & Gestures
- Also known as
- facepalm emoji meaning🤦 meaningperson facepalming
Put it in a message
When 🤦 is the right choice
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