Try Selfie emoji
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Meaning & usage
What does the Selfie emoji mean?
An arm holding a phone up, for selfies and taking your own photo.
Self-aware and light. It usually comes with a joke about vanity attached.
How to use 🤳 naturally
Photo posts, getting-ready pictures and jokes about the angle.
Activity emoji name what is happening rather than how anyone feels about it. They work as compact labels for plans, results and hobbies, which is why invitations and announcements lean on them so heavily.
From standard to slang
The history of 🤳
- 2016
First defined as emoji
According to Unicode’s Emoji Versions data, Selfie 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
Added in 2016 as an arm and hand holding a phone, with skin tone support. It is one of the few emoji named after a behaviour that did not exist when emoji were invented.
- Today
How its use evolved
Photo posts, getting-ready pictures and jokes about the angle.
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.
Forty attempts, one usable 🤳
New haircut, obligatory 🤳
Angle is doing heavy work here 🤳
When to use it
Using 🤳 clearly
Photo posts, getting-ready pictures and jokes about the angle. It lands as selfie emoji 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 selfie emoji
What does 🤳 mean in a text message?
An arm holding a phone up, for selfies and taking your own photo. Self-aware and light. It usually comes with a joke about vanity attached.
Is 🤳 always positive?
Not always. Its usual readings are selfie emoji, 🤳 meaning, photo emoji, and irony or the relationship between the people can flip any of them.
Why does 🤳 look different on another device?
U+1F933 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 selfie 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 selfie 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+1F933 | 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 | \1F933 | For the content property. Keep the quotes around the whole value. | |
| JavaScript | \u{1F933} | A string-literal escape. Needs the u flag inside a regular expression. | |
| URL-encoded | %F0%9F%A4%B3 | Percent-encoded UTF-8, for query strings and API requests. |
Reference card
Emoji details
- Unicode
- U+1F933
- Category
- Activities & Play
- Also known as
- selfie emoji🤳 meaningphoto emoji
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