Anxious Face With Sweat Emoji

A yellow face with open eyes, a small open frown, furrowed eyebrows, a pale blue forehead, and a single bead of sweat. If 😨 is the cold flash of sudden fear, 😰 is the ongoing cold sweat of sustained anxiety. The sweat drop is the key difference: 😨 is frightened in the moment. 😰 is sweating through the moment.

The blue forehead represents the same cold-flash response as 😨, but the addition of sweat signals that the fear has lasted long enough for the body to physically respond. In real life, cold sweats happen when the sympathetic nervous system triggers fight-or-flight but there's nothing to fight or flee from: job interviews, test results loading, waiting for a text back after a hard conversation. The body produces sweat while simultaneously constricting blood vessels, which creates that clammy, cold-skin sensation.

Emojipedia notes it "commonly conveys feelings such as sadness, disappointment, fear, and anxiety." It was approved in Unicode 6.0 (2010) under the name "Face with Open Mouth and Cold Sweat" — nine words that barely fit in a tooltip. The CLDR renamed it to "Anxious Face with Sweat," which better captures the sustained nature of the emotion. In the Emoji Sentiment Ranking (computed from 1.6 million annotated tweets in 13 languages), 😰 registers as bipolar: its negativity and positivity scores are nearly equal, hovering around a net sentiment of zero. That's unusual. Most negative-looking emojis skew strongly negative. 😰 doesn't, because people also use it for situations that resolve well — the anxiety before relief.

😰 is the emoji of active anxiety — not the fear of something happening, but the stress of living through it. It ranks 111th overall among all emojis and 7th within the face-concerned subcategory. Not obscure, but not top-tier either. It lives in the shadow of its louder siblings.

"Waiting for test results 😰" (in the middle of uncertainty). "Running 10 minutes late to the interview 😰" (stress in real time). "The Wi-Fi just dropped during my presentation 😰" (panic with a physical component). The sweat says: my body is reacting and I can't stop it.

It sits at the third rung of the emoji fear ladder: 😟 (worried) → 😨 (fearful) → 😰 (anxious with cold sweat) → 😱 (screaming). 😰 is past fear and into physical anxiety but hasn't hit full terror yet.

There's significant overlap with 😅, which also has sweat. The difference: 😅 grins (nervous laughter, relief), while 😰 frowns (genuine distress, no silver lining). 😅 is "haha, that was close." 😰 is "I'm not through it yet."

A 2025 Frontiers in Psychology study found that women with high social anxiety and loneliness use emojis more frequently — and that this increases further when sending positively valenced messages, as if the emoji compensates for what words can't fully convey. 😰 fits that pattern: it's the kind of emoji people reach for when they need to externalize internal distress quickly.

In Japanese digital culture, where emoji originated, the cold-sweat face maps closely to the concept of 冷や汗 (hiyaase) — literally "cold sweat," used for situations of embarrassment or narrow escapes. Japanese users lean toward using 😰 for social awkwardness as much as fear. In Western messaging, 😰 skews more toward genuine stress and anxiety. Korean users tend to substitute text-based emoticons like ㅠㅠ (tears) for this emotional range, making 😰 less common on Korean platforms compared to Western or Japanese ones.

The COVID-19 pandemic gave 😰 a global moment. Google Trends data shows an 83% search interest spike in Q2 2020, its single largest quarterly jump in recorded history. People worldwide reached for the anxious-sweat face as the pandemic's uncertainty became a daily reality. By 2025, 😰 had settled below its pre-pandemic baseline — the sustained anxiety of 2020 gave way to more specific emoji choices.

• •😰's original Unicode name was "Face with Open Mouth and Cold Sweat" (9 words). The CLDR shortened it to "Anxious Face with Sweat" (4 words). Even the standards body found the name stressful.
• •Cold sweats are a real physiological response to fear: the sympathetic nervous system activates fight-or-flight, producing sweat while constricting blood vessels. 😰 captures this specific medical phenomenon better than any other emoji.
• •The emoji fear ladder (😟 → 😨 → 😰 → 😱) is one of the most finely graded emotional spectrums in the emoji standard. Four faces for four levels of alarm.
• •😰 ranks 111th overall among all emojis, but only 7th within the face-concerned subcategory. It's a niche expert.
• •During Q2 2020, 😰 briefly overtook 😨 in Google Trends search interest — the only sustained period in seven years of data where anxious-sweat face outpaced fearful face.
• •In the sweat-drop emoji family, 😅 at #15 overall is 96 positions more popular than 😰 at #111. Adding a grin to sweat makes it universally relatable. Adding a frown keeps it niche.

• •People sometimes read 😰 as 'crying' because of the droplet. It's sweat, not a tear. The placement is on the forehead/temple area, not the eye. If you want crying, use 😢 or 😭.
• •😰 gets confused with 'feeling hot' or 'working out.' That's 🥵 (hot face) or 💪 (flexed biceps). 😰's sweat is cold — from anxiety, not exertion.
• •Some users send 😰 when they mean 'phew, that's over!' — but that's 😥 (sad but relieved) or 😮‍💨 (exhaling). 😰 is specifically mid-situation, not post-situation.

• •😰 is U+1F630U+1F630. Unicode name: FACE WITH OPEN MOUTH AND COLD SWEAT. CLDR: "anxious face with sweat." Common shortcodes: :cold_sweat::cold_sweat: (Slack, Discord, GitHub). Part of Unicode 6.0 (2010).

See the full Emoji Developer Tools guide for regex patterns, encoding helpers, and more.