Wilted flower 🥀

How to read it

🥀 is U+1F940 WILTED FLOWER, approved in Unicode 9.0 in 2016. Unicode’s emoji subcommittee proposed it in 2015 for compatibility with MSN Messenger, a discontinued chat service whose smileys the subcommittee had compared with Unicode’s emoji. Emojipedia describes the usual design as a faded red rose drooping from a dried-out green stem and shedding a petal, and people call it the dead rose. Not every vendor draws a rose: WhatsApp has a yellow bell-shaped flower, and X and Microsoft a pink blossom. Emojipedia gives its uses as sadness, heartbreak, grief or disappointment, “sometimes with a sense of irony”, and notes that it is also used for a rose or rose petals in a positive sense. Unicode’s keywords for it are only dying, flower and wilted.

Also searched as: 🥀, dead flower emoji, dead rose emoji, wilted rose emoji.

The 2025 swap for the broken heart

Emojipedia’s David Doochin traced a TikTok trend that began in late February 2025: memes mocking 💔 broken heart as too mainstream a sign of sadness, starting from one user’s caption “i might just start using ‘🥀’”. It spread through the corner of TikTok known as JuggTok, and confused enough people that Reddit users asked what the flower meant. Doochin wrote in June 2025 that the meme had peaked in late February. Google’s Gboard data for the whole of 2025, reported by The New York Times in August 2026, put 🥀 on the list of the ten fastest-rising emoji, at 93rd overall. The Deseret News, summarising it, says some people have adopted 🥀 in place of 💔, and ThePrint that teenagers use it to show sadness, heartbreak or emotional exhaustion.

Look-alikes

🌹 rose is the living flower, and Emojipedia says not to confuse the two. Unicode’s chart cross-refers the wilted flower to it, and the rose’s keywords include love and valentine. The red rose meant love long before emoji: the Royal Horticultural Society notes that most people today understand red roses given to a lover, and the history is on the red rose page. Some vendors’ wilted flower was once a different flower: Emojipedia notes that Microsoft’s and Samsung’s designs used to show a wilting 🌷 tulip. The Melting face 🫠 proposal paired the two emoji for “Such is life”.