Face holding back tears 🥹
A face with big eyes welling up with tears and a small smile. It is used for being moved: proud, grateful or touched, and sometimes sad or angry and trying not to show it.
Easily confused with
How to read it
🥹 is U+1F979 FACE HOLDING BACK TEARS, approved in Unicode 14.0 in 2021 and part of Emoji 14.0. It was proposed by Neil Cohn, a cognitive scientist and comics theorist, and Jennifer Daniel (L2/20-064, November 2019, revised February 2020). They wrote that people nearly cry in heated conversations, at funerals, at sad films and songs, and when they are proud of someone, and that this face shows the tension before the tears fall: “the struggle to not cry in the face of strong emotional upheaval”, where other tearful emoji show emotions that have “fully erupted”. Their suggested keywords were proud, tears, angry, sad, resist and hold back. Unicode’s list today has those and more, among them admiration, aww, grateful, gratitude and joy. Emojipedia gives sadness, anger, embarrassment, admiration and gratitude.
Also searched as: 🥹, face holding back tears emoji, face holding back tears emoji meaning, holding back tears emoji, teary eyes emoji, what does the face holding back tears emoji mean.
How people use an emoji changes quickly. These pages give each emoji’s Unicode name and the uses recorded by the sources cited, as of September 2026, and are reviewed yearly.
An old Samsung face
The proposal’s case for compatibility was that a face like this had been on Samsung phones from TouchWiz Nature UX 2 to TouchWiz 7.1, until Samsung redesigned it to match other platforms.
How platforms draw it
Emojipedia says most platforms pair the watery eyes with a small smile, Samsung and Huawei with a more open grin, and Honor and Facebook with a wavering mouth; Huawei’s face also holds its hands against its cheeks. Emojipedia records it as the Most Popular New Emoji of 2022 in the World Emoji Awards.
Look-alikes
🥺 Pleading face has the same large eyes with a frown and no tears. 🥲 smiling face with tear, from Emoji 13.0, shows a single tear on a smile; Emojipedia says both can be used in contexts like 🥹’s. On 😭 loudly crying face the tears have fallen.
Read next
- Next in Emoji meaningsWoozy face 🥴A face with uneven eyes and a wavy mouth. It means tipsy or drunk, and also dizzy, dazed, worn out or overwhelmed.
- The same shape in Pyrex and Depression glass patternsGooseberry (Pyrex pattern)Gooseberry is a Pyrex pattern of gooseberry branches with leaves, flowers and berries, made by Corning Glass Works from 1957 to 1966. Most pieces are pink on white or white on pink.
More emoji meanings
The same shape elsewhere
Browse symbols drawn with circles.
Sources
- Supplemental Symbols and Pictographs, Range: 1F900–1F9FF (code chart), The Unicode Standard, Unicode Consortium, U+1F979
- emoji-test.txt, Emoji Keyboard/Display Test Data for UTS #51, version 18.0, 30 April 2026, Unicode Consortium, face-concerned; face-smiling
- Emoji List, v18.0, Unicode emoji charts (CLDR short names and English keywords), read September 2026, Unicode Consortium, U+1F979
- Emoji Proposals, v18.0, Unicode emoji charts, read September 2026, Unicode Consortium, 1F979; L2/20-064
- Face Holding Back Tears Proposal for Unicode 14.0, Unicode document L2/20-064 (Neil Cohn and Jennifer Daniel), 16 November 2019, revised 4 February 2020, Unicode Consortium document register, Header; I; A. Compatibility; B.2 Multiple usages; C. Image distinctiveness
- Face Holding Back Tears Emoji Meaning, Emojipedia emoji page, read October 2026, Emojipedia, Meaning
Researched, edited and approved by Rory Hansen before publishing. Last reviewed October 9, 2026. How we research
Added .