Bouquet Emoji

A wrapped bouquet of mixed flowers, usually shown with pink, red, and yellow blooms tied together. Emojipedia lists it under "Bouquet," and it's the emoji equivalent of showing up at the door with flowers. Broader than 🌹 (single red rose, specifically romantic), broader than 🌷 (single tulip, spring). 💐 is an arrangement, an occasion, a gesture.

Use it for congratulations, weddings, Mother's Day, birthdays, thank-yous, apologies, condolences, bachelorette parties, engagement announcements, and every milestone that calls for 'flowers.' It's one of the few emoji that reads clearly as 'positive' across every relationship type, you can send it to a partner, a coworker, a grieving friend, or your boss's retirement message with no context whiplash.

The cultural weight sitting behind it is significant. Americans spent $3.2 billion on Mother's Day flowers alone in 2024, and roughly 25% of all flowers sold annually are purchased for Mother's Day. The global cut-flower industry sits at about $41 billion a year, with the Netherlands alone exporting over $4.4 billion in flowers in 2025. Every 💐 you send is propped up by a supply chain that runs through Aalsmeer, Bogotá, and Nairobi.

Peaks on Mother's Day (second Sunday in May), Valentine's Day, and through the fall wedding season. Works in almost any message type: Mother's Day posts, condolence messages, 'thanks for the lift' texts, engagement reveals, graduation congratulations, performance-recap posts from dancers and musicians. Almost never ironic, almost never flirty in a sharp way, it has a sincerity the rose can't match.

On Instagram, 💐 captions outperform 🌹 for wedding-adjacent content because the bouquet reads as the whole occasion, not just the romance. On TikTok, the sympathy-flower usage has grown since 2023 as creators post 'my grandma passed' videos paired with 💐🕊️ in the overlay text.

Warm, not hot. 💐 reads as sincere, thoughtful, considered. It's not a flirting emoji, it's a caring one, which is why it crosses relationship types without awkwardness.

The bridal bouquet, the most culturally loaded use of 💐 today, is much newer than it feels. Ancient Romans carried floral garlands at weddings as symbols of fertility and fidelity. Medieval European brides carried bundles of herbs (rosemary, sage, dill, garlic) because they believed the strong smells warded off evil spirits and the plague. The modern, beautiful, purely-ornamental bouquet is a Victorian invention.

Queen Victoria's 1840 wedding to Prince Albert is the turning point. She carried a small clutch of myrtle and orange blossoms, and the wedding was so widely documented that every upper-class bride across Europe copied it. Myrtle became the royal wedding flower (cuttings from Victoria's original sprig have been used in every British royal wedding bouquet since, including Kate Middleton's in 2011), and orange blossoms became the general bridal flower across Europe and the US.

The bouquet toss comes from a weirder place. Medieval wedding guests would tear pieces from the bride's dress and veil for luck, and brides started tossing the bouquet (or garter) as a distraction so they could escape intact. Over centuries, the distraction became the tradition, with the catcher meant to marry next.

The Victorians also gave us floriography, the coded bouquet language. Flower dictionaries published in France from 1810 onward assigned specific meanings to every bloom, with the combination and arrangement carrying a message: a rose meant love, a striped carnation meant polite refusal, a yellow chrysanthemum meant slighted love. Kate Middleton's 2011 bouquet was deliberately composed from floriography: myrtle for love and marriage, ivy for fidelity, sweet william for gallantry. The emoji sits on top of all of this without expressing any of it.

Approved in Unicode 6.0 (2010) as U+1F490U+1F490 BOUQUET. Added to Emoji 1.0 in 2015. Single codepoint, no skin tone or variation sequences. The design originally came from Japanese carrier emoji where it served as a gifting-occasion icon, often seen alongside 🎁 and 🎂 in digital greeting-card contexts.

1. 2010Approved in Unicode 6.0. Early Japanese carrier designs showed a tight, round posy with mixed blooms and a bow at the stems.
2. 2015Apple iOS 9 set the now-standard rendering: pink, orange, and yellow tulip-and-daisy mix with a tied base.
3. 2019Google Noto redesigns with warmer tones and a wider variety of bloom shapes, pushing the emoji slightly further from a 'single-purchase supermarket bouquet' toward a 'florist-assembled arrangement.'
4. 2022Samsung flattens the design for One UI 4. Twitter/X keeps a classic retro bouquet look that many users prefer.
5. 2024Vendors converge on a pink-dominant palette with 3-5 visible bloom types. Modern renderings consistently include tulips, daisies, and at least one rose-like bloom.

In Japan, hana kotoba (flower language) is still active in florist training. Bouquets are expected to be assembled with an eye to color and seasonal appropriateness. White chrysanthemums specifically belong to funerals, so you don't send them as congratulations. In Japan, sending flowers to a funeral is actually uncommon for non-family, the traditional gesture is 'koden,' a monetary envelope.

In Korea, there's a cultural convention of giving 20 roses for a 20th birthday, 30 for a 30th, and so on, birthday bouquets are literally counted. In China and Korea, even numbers of flowers are usually preferred for celebrations, and the number four is avoided because it sounds like the word for death.

In Russia, flowers must be given in odd numbers at celebrations and even numbers at funerals, the reverse of East Asia. In much of continental Europe, yellow flowers can carry jealousy or infidelity implications, and white flowers skew funeral-coded in Catholic countries.

The 💐 emoji papers over all of this. Everyone reads it as 'a nice gesture,' which is exactly its cultural usefulness.

• •Modern bridal bouquets trace back to Queen Victoria's 1840 wedding. She carried myrtle and orange blossoms, and every royal bride since has included a cutting from her original myrtle plant.
• •Medieval brides carried rosemary, sage, and garlic, not for fragrance, but to ward off evil spirits. The modern 'pretty flowers' version is an aesthetic upgrade from a weaponized herb bundle.
• •The bouquet toss began as a distraction. Medieval wedding guests would literally tear pieces off the bride's dress for luck. Throwing the bouquet gave her a chance to escape.
• •Americans spend about $3.2 billion on Mother's Day flowers each year. That single Sunday is roughly 25% of all flower sales annually.
• •The global cut-flower market is about $41 billion. The Netherlands alone exported $4.4 billion in 2025. Kenya exports roughly 111,000 tons of cut flowers annually.
• •In Japan, white chrysanthemums mean funerals, not birthdays. Send them for a Tokyo birthday and it lands badly.
• •In Russia, give odd numbers for celebrations and even numbers for funerals. In China and Korea, it's the reverse. 💐 works because it's an uncountable arrangement.
• •Kate Middleton's 2011 wedding bouquet was composed from Victorian flower-language rules: myrtle (love), ivy (fidelity), sweet william (gallantry), hyacinth (constancy), lily of the valley (happiness).
• •Victorians delivered bouquets upside-down to mean the opposite of what they'd normally signal. A 'no thank you' bouquet was a real genre.
• •Valentine's Day floral spending in the US ($2.9B in 2025, $3.1B projected 2026) has almost caught up to Mother's Day's $3.2B. The gap that used to define the floral calendar is basically gone.
• •Mother's Day total retail spend has grown from $21B (2015) to $34B (2025), but the floral slice has been stuck at roughly $3.2B the whole time. Flowers are losing share to spa days, jewelry, and experience gifts.

• •Kate Middleton's wedding bouquet, 2011: Composed entirely via Victorian floriography, myrtle (love), ivy (fidelity), sweet william (gallantry), hyacinth (constancy), lily of the valley (happiness). The royal PR walked through each flower's meaning, briefly reviving floriography in mainstream wedding coverage.
• •Miley Cyrus, Flowers (2023): 'I can buy myself flowers' rewrote the cultural shorthand of 💐 for a year. The song spent 8 weeks at #1 on the Billboard Hot 100 and made self-gifted bouquets a TikTok staple. 💐 usage in 'treat-yourself' captions spiked visibly through 2023.
• •Father of the Bride (1991): The bridal bouquet toss scene became the canonical American wedding image of the decade. The bouquet depicted (peonies, roses, and lilies of the valley) is the design Apple and Google's 💐 most closely resembles.
• •Floriography, The Language of Flowers, Kate Greenaway (1884): The English-language handbook that cemented Victorian floriography. Still in print, still consulted by wedding florists, still quietly encoding modern bouquets.

• •Single codepoint U+1F490U+1F490. No ZWJ sequence, no skin-tone variants.
• •Shortcodes: :bouquet::bouquet:. Discord also accepts :flowers::flowers: via some bots.
• •Category: 'nature,' though it behaves like an object emoji in gift-card and event contexts. Worth considering if you're building emoji pickers for greeting-card apps.

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