Baby Bottle Emoji

A baby bottle with milk and a pink or blue nipple. Approved in Unicode 6.0 in 2010 as U+1F37CU+1F37C BABY BOTTLE. Added to Emoji 1.0.

🍼 represents babies, infant feeding, parenthood, and new-baby announcements. It's a key emoji in pregnancy content, baby shower posts, and parenting culture. The drink inside is deliberately generic — it could be breast milk, formula, or mixed feeding. Globally, about 48% of infants under 6 months are exclusively breastfed (WHO data), with wide regional variation: 60%+ in South Asia and East Africa, only 26% in North America.

The baby-bottle design the emoji depicts has a specific history. Elijah Pratt of New York patented the first rubber nipple in 1845, four years after C.M. Windship patented the first US glass nursing bottle. Practical rubber nipples didn't exist until the early 1900s — before then, rubber nipples had strong odors and hot water destroyed them.

Beyond the literal, 🍼 carries two slang uses:

- Intensifier for laughter. Often follows 🤣 or ☠️ in texts, signaling 'I'm laughing so hard I'm back to being a baby.' - 'You're acting like a baby' dig. Light insult implying immaturity. Rarely serious.

🍼 shows up heavily in parenting content and specific slang contexts. Main clusters:

Baby announcements. 🍼👶🎀 is one of the most reliable pregnancy-reveal / birth-announcement combos. Part of an unwritten template that parents across cultures use.

Parenting content. Mom-TikTok, dad-TikTok, the 'parenting is chaos' content genre. 🍼😴 for night-feeding posts; 🍼☕ for 'running on coffee and formula' content.

Baby shower / gender reveal content. Sugary pastel aesthetics, games, cakes. 🍼 is the default signal that content is baby-event related.

'Laughing like a baby' intensifier. 🤣🍼 or 😂🍼 — 'so funny I regressed.' Gen Z and millennial usage mostly.

Sibling / older-child 'being babied' dig. 'You're so 🍼' when someone's being over-sensitive or immature. Mild insult.

Sober / recovery contexts. Occasionally used to signal 'early sobriety' — the metaphor of starting over as new. Less common but present in recovery-adjacent content.

The emoji is rarely used outside parenting / childhood / slang contexts. It's one of the most single-purpose drink emojis in the set.

The baby bottle is surprisingly recent as a mass-produced infant-feeding tool. Before 1840, infants were fed with spoons, cups, animal horns, or specialized ceramic feeders. Wet nursing (hiring another lactating woman) was the common alternative to maternal breastfeeding.

Two mid-19th-century inventions created the modern bottle:

- 1841: C.M. Windship patents the first US glass nursing bottle. - 1845: Elijah Pratt of New York patents the first rubber nipple — described in the patent as 'an Instrument for Protecting Sore Nipples, by which an infant can draw the breast without paining its mother.'

Early rubber nipples were a mess. They smelled strongly, leached chemicals, and couldn't survive hot water sterilization. Practical rubber nipples didn't exist until the early 1900s. Only then did bottle-feeding become truly mainstream.

The 20th century brought a run of formula breakthroughs. Dried and evaporated formula (1867, Henri Nestlé), soy-based formula (1929), and iron-fortified formula (1959) each reshaped the bottle's contents. Formula marketing after WWII dramatically reduced breastfeeding rates in developed countries — a trend that has only partially reversed.

🍼 shipped in Unicode 6.0 in 2010, part of the original emoji-standardization batch. Its pink or blue nipple color varies by vendor but the glass-bottle-with-milk design is universal.

1. 1841C.M. Windship patents the first US glass nursing bottle
2. 1845Elijah Pratt patents the first rubber nipple in New York — early versions are smelly and easily destroyed by hot water↗
3. 1867Henri Nestlé invents commercial infant formula in Switzerland
4. 1900Practical modern rubber nipples finally developed — bottle-feeding becomes widely adoptable
5. 1929Soy-based formula is commercially introduced, enabling dairy-free infant feeding
6. 1959Iron-fortified formula becomes standard in developed countries
7. 1981WHO International Code of Marketing of Breastmilk Substitutes restricts aggressive formula marketing — effects still debated
8. 2010Approved in Unicode 6.0 as U+1F37C BABY BOTTLE↗
9. 2025[Global exclusive breastfeeding rate hits ~48%](https://www.who.int/health-topics/breastfeeding) (WHO); target for 2025 was 50%

• •Elijah Pratt patented the first rubber nipple in 1845. The patent described it as 'an Instrument for Protecting Sore Nipples, by which an infant can draw the breast without paining its mother.'
• •Before the 1840s, infants were fed with spoons, cups, ceramic pap-feeders, or animal horns. Wet nursing (hiring another lactating woman) was the common alternative to maternal breastfeeding.
• •Early rubber nipples smelled terribly and disintegrated in hot water. Practical modern versions didn't exist until the early 1900s. The mass-produced bottle is only ~120 years old.
• •Henri Nestlé invented commercial infant formula in 1867, starting a 150-year global industry that still shapes feeding culture.
• •Global exclusive breastfeeding rates hit ~48% in 2023-24. WHO's target of 50% by 2025 came close but didn't quite land.
• •US breastfeeding rates are among the lowest globally at 26% for 6-month exclusive. Rwanda and Sri Lanka lead at ~81%.
• •Between 2005 and 2019, global formula sales grew 121.5%00163-2/fulltext) while exclusive breastfeeding rose only 20%. The Lancet published a major critique of formula marketing in 2023.
• •The 2022 US infant formula shortage — caused by a plant shutdown in Michigan — lasted months and triggered policy discussions about formula manufacturing concentration. 🍼 was central to the political content around it.
• •The 1981 WHO International Code of Marketing of Breastmilk Substitutes restricted aggressive formula marketing, but enforcement remains uneven. The debate still runs through modern 🍼 parenting discourse.

• •The Simpsons Maggie Simpson: the show's baby never grows up, and her pacifier-and-bottle routine is probably the most-watched fictional bottle in TV history. 🍼 inherits some Maggie energy.
• •Look Who's Talking (1989): the Bruce Willis-narrated baby movie made 'baby POV' a pop-culture thing. 🍼 plus 👶 carries that conceptual frame.
• •Rugrats: entire animated franchise centered on baby life. 🍼 content creators from the 90s often reference it directly.
• •Beyoncé's twins announcement (2017): her 'pregnant with twins' Instagram photo was one of the most-liked posts in Instagram history at the time. Fan content used 🍼🍼 combos heavily.
• •Ferber method / Taking Cara Babies / sleep-training discourse: 🍼🌙 combos dominate parenting content around this ongoing debate.

• •🍼 is U+1F37CU+1F37C. Common shortcodes: :baby_bottle::baby_bottle: (Slack, Discord, GitHub).
• •Emoji 1.0 / Unicode 6.0 — universally supported since 2010. No FE0F variant selector needed.
• •Narrowly-scoped emoji: use only for infant-feeding, parenting, birth-announcement, or baby-adjacent UI. Overusing in adult-drink contexts reads oddly.

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