The Most Misunderstood Emojis: What You Think They Mean vsVariation Selector (VS)
Unicode characters (VS-15 U+FE0E and VS-16 U+FE0F) that modify whether a character renders in text (monochrome) or emoji (colorful) presentation.. What They Actually Mean
You've probably sent an emojiEmoji
A Japanese word (絵文字) meaning 'picture character' — small graphical symbols used in digital communication to express ideas, emotions, and objects. that meant something entirely different to the person who received it. You've almost certainly received one and misread it completely. This isn't a failure of communication — it's a built-in feature of a system built on tiny, ambiguous images interpreted by billions of people with different cultural backgrounds, generational contexts, and platform experiences.
Some emojis, though, are misunderstood so consistently and so consequentially that they deserve special attention. Here are the emojis most likely to cause confusion, and what they actually mean in different contexts.
💁 Information Desk Person (or "Sassy Hand Flip")
Official meaning: A person at an information desk, hand extended helpfully.
How it's actually used: Almost universally as "sassy hair flip" — expressing attitude, confidence, shade, or dramatic dismissal. The official "helpful desk worker" interpretation was abandoned by users almost immediately after the emoji's arrival.
Sending 💁 in response to being criticized means something like "and? your point?" or "I know I'm amazing, thanks." The gap between UnicodeUnicode
Universal character encoding standard that assigns a unique number to every character across all writing systems and symbol sets, including emoji.'s intended meaning and lived usage is rarely wider than with this character.
Platform complication: On some platforms, the outstretched hand looks like it's flipping hair; on others, it looks genuinely helpful. The visual ambiguity maps to the semantic ambiguity.
😬 Grimacing Face
Official meaning: A grimace — discomfort, awkwardness, cringing.
How it's actually used: This is where real miscommunication happens. In American English internet culture, 😬 often expresses enthusiasm or "big smile" energy — a misreading likely driven by users seeing a large-teeth grin rather than a grimace. The intended cringe reads as excitement to a significant portion of users.
The result: someone sends 😬 meaning "yikes, that's awkward," and the recipient reads it as "wow, exciting!" This is documented in research from Minnesota's GroupLens lab as one of the highest-disagreement emoji in terms of sentiment interpretation.
Safe use: Add context when using this one, or choose 😅 (awkward sweat) or 🫣 (peeking through fingers) if your meaning is discomfort.
😮💨 Face Exhaling
Official meaning: Releasing a sigh of relief, exhaustion, or exasperation.
How it's actually used: Frequently misread as someone blowing a kiss, exhaling smoke, or in some contexts, performing some kind of wind-related action. The small size of the exhaled breath trail is easy to miss or misinterpret.
Users who mean "I'm exhausted" or "finally, relief" often find their message read as flirtatious or confusing by recipients unfamiliar with this relatively newer emoji.
👌 OK Hand
Official meaning: The classic "A-OK" gesture — approval, agreement, everything is fine.
How it's actually used: Still widely used in its original positive sense by most of the world. However, the 👌 emoji was adopted as a symbol by certain extremist communities in the late 2010s in an orchestrated campaign that was partly sincere adoption and partly a hoax designed to generate panic about innocent gestures.
The result is that 👌 now exists in an uncomfortable middle zone: most users mean "okay, great" and most recipients read it that way. But in certain contexts — particularly in commentary on political content — it carries a much more charged secondary reading. Most emoji guides now recommend awareness of context before using 👌 in professional or public political spaces.
🙃 Upside-Down Face
Official meaning: A playful, silly face — often used for joking or sarcasm.
How it's actually used: This is the "passive aggressive I'm fine" emoji. The upside-down smile signals that something is the opposite of fine — ironic cheerfulness masking frustration, stress, or emotional distress. "Everything is fine 🙃" means nothing is fine.
This is a case where users collectively decided on a meaning quite far from the Unicode description, and the usage has been remarkably consistent across English-speaking internet culture. Younger users especially use it to express the specific emotional exhaustion of performing okayness.
Generational gap: Older or less digitally fluent recipients may read 🙃 as simply goofy or playful, missing the distress signal entirely. This creates real miscommunication between generations.
💋 Kiss Mark
Official meaning: A kiss — lipstick imprint, affection, goodbye.
How it's actually used: Generally as intended, but with significant variation in intimacy level. In some contexts it's a friendly farewell (equivalent to "xo"). In others it's clearly romantic or flirtatious. In still others it's a sign-off with no romantic implication whatsoever.
The ambiguity of how intimate 💋 is intended creates awkward moments regularly, particularly in professional-adjacent social contexts where the line between friendly and flirtatious is being navigated carefully.
🫠 Melting Face
Official meaning: A melting face — often used for embarrassment, extreme heat, or overwhelm.
How it's actually used: Overwhelmingly to express being "done," melting from pressure, or the sensation of one's composure dissolving under stress or embarrassment. "Just got asked to present to the entire company tomorrow 🫠" is the classic use case.
Less commonly, it's used literally for hot weather 🌡️🫠. The confusion comes when recipients unfamiliar with the emoji's current cultural weight read it as literal melting rather than emotional collapse.
🥲 Smiling Face with Tear
Official meaning: Touched, moved to happy tears — bittersweet emotion, pride, gratitude mixed with emotion.
How it's actually used: This one splits almost evenly between its intended meaning (genuinely touched, "I'm so happy I could cry") and something darker: "I'm smiling through the pain." The teardrop reads as distress to many users, and combined with the smile, it maps onto the same emotional territory as 🙃 — performing happiness while actually struggling.
Context is everything with 🥲. "My dog learned a new trick 🥲" is probably genuine tenderness. "Another Monday 🥲" is probably ironic suffering.
😂 Loudly Crying Laughing Face
Official meaning and original use: Crying with laughter — finding something so funny it brings tears.
Current usage: Still the most-sent emoji globally by many measures, but its meaning has fractured significantly. For older millennials and Gen X users, 😂 still means genuine laughter. For many Gen Z users, 😂 has become associated with older people's humor — "my dad sends 😂," essentially — and carries a faintly cringe connotation when used to signal genuine amusement.
💀 (skull) has largely replaced 😂 for many younger users to mean "I'm dead from how funny this is." Sending 😂 to a Gen Z recipient when you mean sincere amusement may land differently than you intend.
🏻🏼🏽🏾🏿 Skin Tone Modifiers Without a Base Emoji
Sending a skin tone modifierSkin Tone Modifier
Five Unicode modifier characters based on the Fitzpatrick scale that change the skin color of human emoji (U+1F3FB to U+1F3FF). alone — the bare color swatch — is not standard usage, but it happens when emoji sequences are broken apart or when someone pastes text without realizing the modifier is separate from its intended base emoji. Recipients see a strange colored square and don't know what it means.
This is more a technical confusion than a semantic one, but it generates consistent puzzlement.
What This Means for Communication
The lesson from this list isn't that emoji communication is doomed to misunderstanding. Most emoji, most of the time, communicate well enough for their purpose. But for the cases where precision matters — emotional check-ins, professional communication, cross-generational or cross-cultural messages — it's worth knowing which characters carry the most interpretive risk.
When in doubt: add words. Emoji work best as supplements to text, not substitutes for it.
Explore More on EmojiFYI
Test your emoji knowledge or compare how specific emojis look across different platforms — visual differences between iOS, Android, and Windows are part of why misunderstandings happen.