Clown face 🤡

How to read it

🤡 is U+1F921 CLOWN FACE, approved in Unicode 9.0 in 2016 and part of Emoji 3.0. It was added for compatibility with Yahoo Messenger, according to the Emoji Subcommittee’s 2015 list of additions (L2/15-054r4), which gives the same reason for 🤠 face with cowboy hat. Unicode’s keywords for it are only clown and face. Dictionary.com’s entry says it is used for silly, goofy feelings or for someone acting like a clown, meaning “foolish”, and, because some people find clowns creepy, for a person or thing that is scary or suspicious, the clown of Pennywise in Stephen King’s It. Emojipedia gives the same two sides: a person who has behaved foolishly, embarrassingly or incompetently, and something creepy, scary or bizarre. It adds self-deprecating use.

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How younger people use it

Dictionary.com’s 2022 guide says millennials may think 🤡 is just a clown, while for Gen Z it is a universal symbol for someone acting or saying something incredibly foolish: a string of clowns under a quoted hot take they disagree with. It is used for one’s own foolishness too: “I really just gave my toddler spaghetti while he was wearing a white shirt 🤡”.

How platforms draw it

Dictionary.com describes white make-up, a red nose and two tufts of hair, red on most platforms but blue on WhatsApp, X (formerly Twitter) and Facebook. Emojipedia notes that Facebook’s clown wears a black hat and Honor’s a party hat, and that Google’s first design had pale orange hair and large blue patches round the eyes.