Upside-Down Face Emoji
A smile turned over, marking irony, resignation or cheerfulness that is barely holding.
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Meaning & usage
What does the Upside-Down Face emoji mean?
A smile turned over, marking irony, resignation or cheerfulness that is barely holding.
Ironic by design. It marks a sentence as not-quite-sincere, most often masking annoyance or exhaustion behind cheerfulness, and it rarely means simple silliness any more.
How to use 🙃 naturally
Saying something is fine when it plainly is not, or flagging a joke as sarcasm.
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, Upside-Down 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 plain smile rotated 180 degrees. Nothing about the drawing changed, only its orientation, and that alone turns sincerity into irony.
- Today
How its use evolved
Saying something is fine when it plainly is not, or flagging a joke as sarcasm.
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.
Third meeting about the same thing 🙃
Slept four hours, feeling great 🙃
Sure, no problem at all 🙃
When to use it
Using 🙃 clearly
Saying something is fine when it plainly is not, or flagging a joke as sarcasm. It lands as upside down face meaning or sarcasm 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 upside-down face emoji
What does 🙃 mean in a text message?
A smile turned over, marking irony, resignation or cheerfulness that is barely holding. Ironic by design. It marks a sentence as not-quite-sincere, most often masking annoyance or exhaustion behind cheerfulness, and it rarely means simple silliness any more.
Is 🙃 always positive?
Not always. Its usual readings are upside down face meaning, sarcasm emoji, upside down smiley, and irony or the relationship between the people can flip any of them.
Why does 🙃 look different on another device?
U+1F643 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 upside-down 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 upside-down 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.
Easily confused
🙃 compared with similar emoji
These sit close enough in meaning that people reach for the wrong one. Here is what actually separates them.
Upside-Down Face or Slightly Smiling Face?
Both mask something. 🙃 shows you know it, while 🙂 keeps a straight face — which is why 🙂 reads as colder.
Upside-Down Face or Melting Face?
🫠 is dissolving under the pressure; 🙃 is still upright and coping, just ironically.
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+1F643 | 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 | \1F643 | For the content property. Keep the quotes around the whole value. | |
| JavaScript | \u{1F643} | A string-literal escape. Needs the u flag inside a regular expression. | |
| URL-encoded | %F0%9F%99%83 | Percent-encoded UTF-8, for query strings and API requests. |
Reference card
Emoji details
- Unicode
- U+1F643
- Category
- Smileys & Emotion
- Also known as
- upside down face meaningsarcasm emojiupside down smiley
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