Melting face 🫠

How to read it

🫠 is U+1FAE0 MELTING FACE, approved in Unicode 14.0 in 2021. Emojipedia’s changelog records it reaching iPhones with iOS 15.4 in March 2022, after Google’s design had already been on the front page of The New York Times in September 2021. Emojipedia reads it literally for extreme heat and metaphorically for “embarrassment, shame, a slowly sinking sense of dread, or feeling overwhelmed”, and says the smile that survives the melting lends it to sarcasm. Dictionary.com’s 2023 entry gives extreme heat and strong emotions such as embarrassment, shame, disgust or frustration. Unicode’s English keywords for it include embarrassed, heat, sarcasm and lol.

Also searched as: 🫠, melting face emoji.

What its proposers said it means

The proposal, L2/20-072 in Unicode’s document register, is by Neil Cohn, Jennifer Daniel and Erik Carter, dated December 2019 and updated in February 2020. Its case was that the face “can convey two conflicting emotions simultaneously”, and it listed the uses with sample captions: happy but also sad (“This is normal”), putting on a good face despite pain (“Everything is fine”), summer heat, wanting to disappear (“I’d like to not be here right now”) and regret (“Just ate all the cookies in one sitting”). It paired the face with the Wilted flower 🥀 for “Such is life”.

The idea came from Japanese comics. The proposal was one of six faces meant to bring the “visual morphology” of Japanese visual language into emoji, and Dictionary.com cites Cohn as saying it was inspired by a manga trope in which an embarrassed character turns into paper and flies away, with the melting face made “more visceral”. Dictionary.com credits the design to Cohn and Daniel; the proposal also names Carter.

Look-alikes

🥵 hot face is the literal one: a red, sweating face, whose Unicode keywords are all about heat (feverish, panting, red-faced, sweating). 🫥 dotted line face, from the same 2021 release, is drawn in a dotted outline, fading rather than melting, and its keywords (disappear, hidden, invisible, introvert) share the melting face’s wish to vanish.