Upside-down face 🙃

How to read it

🙃 is U+1F643 UPSIDE-DOWN FACE, added in Unicode 8.0 in 2015; Unicode’s emoji data places it in Emoji 1.0. It came from Gmail. Mark Davis and Peter Edberg’s 2014 list of emoji to add to Unicode, many of them for compatibility with AIM, MSN Messenger or Gmail, gives Gmail’s UPSIDE DOWN FACE as its source and notes that it was “also common emoticon”. Unicode’s English keywords for it are only face, hehe, smile and upside-down. Dictionary.com’s entry lists silliness, sarcasm, irony, passive aggression and frustrated resignation, and says it is often used in place of the older tone markers /s and jk, to show that a statement has a hidden meaning or is not to be taken seriously. Being the opposite of the ordinary smiley, Dictionary.com suggests, it invites reading a message as the opposite of what it seems. Emojipedia gives irony, sarcasm, joking and goofiness, and compares its intent to the bemused “Oh well!” of the shrug.

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Sarcasm or a bad day?

It depends partly on who sends it. Dictionary.com’s 2022 guide for millennials says the older generation often used 🙃 for sarcasm or silliness, while for Gen Z it is “basically code for ‘this is terrible’”: something has gone wrong or the day is going badly, as in “So, my flight just got canceled. 🙃”. The guide calls the newer use more literal. Dictionary.com’s 2018 entry had already described it, as a comical level of misfortune, the sender “smiling through the pain”, or the “this is fine” of the cartoon dog sitting in a burning room.

Look-alikes

Turned the right way up it is 🙂 slightly smiling face, U+1F642, also from Emoji 1.0. Emojipedia says most platforms draw 🙃 as that face flipped over, though Microsoft’s design once had a full-toothed grin. The difference to look for is where the eyes are: below the mouth on 🙃.