Bathtub Emoji

A white clawfoot bathtub with a shower head, often shown with bubbles or suds on Apple and Facebook. This is the self-care emoji. When someone texts 🛁, they almost never mean the physical object. They mean "I'm unwinding," "I need a break," or "tonight's plan: bath, candle, wine, done."

The pandemic turned 🛁 into a cultural moment. Google Trends shows searches for the 🛁 emoji spiking 18x in Q2 2020 (from 3 to 55 on a 100-point scale) as millions of locked-down people discovered that baths are basically free therapy. That spike coincided with "self care" searches rising 250% during COVID-19. The interest never fully receded. By 2025, 🛁 searches have steadily grown to 24, roughly 8x pre-pandemic levels.

On TikTok, #BathTok is a thriving subculture where creators film aesthetic bath routines with ASMR sounds, bath bombs dissolving in slow motion, and candle-lit setups that look more like spa photoshoots than personal hygiene. The bath bomb market hit $2 billion in 2024 and is projected to reach $3.3 billion by 2033, driven largely by social media aesthetics.

Instagram captions pair 🛁 with 🕯️ (candle), 🍷 (wine), and 🧖 (person in steamy room) to signal a self-care night. Popular hashtags include #bathtime, #selfcaresunday, #bathtok, and #homespa. The emoji works in DMs as a soft "I'm done for the day" signal, letting someone know you're going offline to decompress.

There's a seasonal pattern too. Bath-related searches and posts spike in Q4 every year, peaking around November-December when colder weather and holiday stress drive people toward warm baths. The Q4 spike is especially visible in bath bomb searches, where the holiday gift market compounds the seasonal comfort factor.

In Japan, where 90% of people bathe daily and public bathhouses (sento) are cultural institutions, the bathtub emoji carries more weight than in shower-dominant countries like the US, where 90% of people prefer showers over baths.

Bathing is one of humanity's oldest rituals. The earliest known bathtub, found at the Palace of Knossos in Crete, dates to around 1700 BCE. Ancient Romans turned bathing into a social institution: their thermae (public bathhouses) featured hot rooms, cold plunge pools, libraries, gymnasiums, and lecture halls. Most Romans bathed daily. When asked why he only bathed once a day, one emperor reportedly replied, "Because I do not have time to bathe twice."

The modern clawfoot tub that 🛁 depicts emerged in the Victorian era. John Michael Kohler created the first American bathtub in 1883 in Sheboygan, Wisconsin, by enamel-coating a cast-iron horse trough and adding four decorative feet. Indoor plumbing didn't become common in working-class homes until the 1920s.

The emoji was encoded in Unicode 6.0 (2010) as U+1F6C1U+1F6C1 BATHTUB. Most platforms render it as a white clawfoot tub with a shower head. Apple and Facebook add bubbles. Samsung shows streaming water. The shortcode is :bathtub::bathtub:.

The relationship between people and baths varies wildly by country. In Japan, bathing is a deeply communal and ritualized practice stretching back over 1,000 years. About 90% of Japanese people bathe daily, and the country's sento (public bathhouses) and onsen (natural hot spring baths) are social hubs, not just hygiene stations. At its peak, Japan had nearly 17,000 sento; today there are around 3,000 as home baths have become standard.

In the US, 90% of people prefer showers over baths. American bathrooms are built around the shower-tub combo, and standalone bathtubs are marketed as luxury upgrades. In the UK, 32% still prefer baths, which tracks with the British reputation for a good soak.

In Finland, the sauna fills the bathing ritual role that tubs fill elsewhere. There are 3.3 million saunas in Finland for a population of 5.5 million. In Turkey, the hamam (Turkish bath) tradition involves steam, scrubbing, and social interaction.

In South Korea, jjimjilbang (bathhouse/sauna complexes) are entire social experiences with sleeping areas, restaurants, and entertainment rooms.

• •The oldest known bathtub, found at the Palace of Knossos in Crete, dates to around 1700 BCE. People have been soaking for nearly 4,000 years.
• •Google searches for the 🛁 emoji spiked 18x in Q2 2020 during COVID lockdowns, from 3 to 55 on Google Trends' 100-point scale. "Self care" searches rose 250% in the same period.
• •The first American bathtub was created in 1883 in Sheboygan, Wisconsin by John Michael Kohler, who enamel-coated a cast-iron horse trough and added four decorative feet.
• •Japan had nearly 17,000 public bathhouses (sento) at its peak. Today there are about 3,000, as home baths became standard. But 90% of Japanese people still bathe daily.
• •The bath bomb market hit $2 billion in 2024, projected to reach $3.3 billion by 2033 at 6.2% annual growth, driven largely by social media aesthetics and the #BathTok trend.
• •Finland has 3.3 million saunas for a population of 5.5 million. The sauna fills the same ritual bathing role that tubs fill in other cultures.
• •When asked why he only bathed once a day, a Roman emperor reportedly replied, "Because I do not have time to bathe twice." The Baths of Caracalla could hold 1,600 bathers at once.

• •Hitchcock's Psycho shower scene (1960) is cinema's most famous bathroom moment, even though it's technically a shower, not a bath. It took a week to film, used chocolate syrup for blood, and the stabbing sounds were made by puncturing a melon. It permanently changed how audiences felt about being vulnerable in a bathroom.
• •TikTok's #BathTok subculture turns bath routines into ASMR content: bath bombs dissolving in slow motion, candle-lit setups, and aesthetic product arrangements. Some BathTok videos hit 800K+ likes. It's the visual intersection of wellness culture and content creation.
• •Lush Cosmetics essentially invented the "bath as visual spectacle" category with their fizzing, color-exploding bath bombs. In August 2024, Lush celebrated World Bath Bomb Day by introducing AR-enhanced bath bombs that let customers interact with their products digitally. The bath bomb market they helped create hit $2 billion in 2024.
• •A Nightmare on Elm Street (1984) features one of horror's most unsettling bathtub scenes: Nancy dozes off in the tub and Freddy Krueger's gloved hand rises from the water between her legs. It cemented the bathtub as a place where you're both at your most relaxed and most vulnerable.

• •Codepoint: U+1F6C1U+1F6C1. Single codepoint, no variation selector.
• •Shortcode: :bathtub::bathtub: on Slack, Discord, and GitHub.
• •The companion emoji U+1F6C0U+1F6C0 (🛀 Person Taking Bath) supports skin tone modifiers (U+1F3FBU+1F3FB–U+1F3FFU+1F3FF). The bathtub emoji U+1F6C1U+1F6C1 does not.
• •Both 🛁 and 🛀 were encoded in Unicode 6.0 (2010), but the bathtub is classified under "Objects" while the person is under "People & Body."

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