Brown Mushroom Emoji

A realistic, edible mushroom with a brown cap and pale stem. Think cremini, button, or portobello (all the same species, Agaricus bisporus, at different stages of maturity). 🍄‍🟫 exists because the original 🍄 depicts an Amanita muscaria, the red-and-white fairytale toadstool that reads as poisonous, psychedelic, and Mario, often all at once. Food creators needed a mushroom emoji that wouldn't get misread.

Jennifer Daniel, chair of the Unicode Emoji Subcommittee, described the new design as "confident, mindful, cutesy" and offering "a world of earthy simplicity beyond her companion's fairyland legacy." It was purpose-built to be unassuming. No drug subtext, no fantasy, no Nintendo. Just a mushroom you'd put on a pizza.

Approved by the Unicode Consortium on August 28, 2023 as part of Emoji 15.1. It's a ZWJ sequence: U+1F344U+1F344 (mushroom) + U+200DU+200D + U+1F7EBU+1F7EB (brown square). Apple shipped it in iOS 17.4 on March 5, 2024. Google, Samsung, and Microsoft followed through 2024.

Agaricus bisporus accounts for roughly 73% of global mushroom consumption. Button (white, youngest), cremini (brown, adolescent), and portobello (brown, fully grown) are the same species at different ages. 🍄‍🟫 is drawn as the adolescent cremini, which is the most universally recognizable "cooking mushroom" shape.

🍄‍🟫 reads three ways, all wholesome.

Recipes and food content. This is the headline use. Before Emoji 15.1, food creators writing about mushroom risotto or miso-glazed shiitake had to use 🍄 and accept that half their readers pictured Super Mario. Now recipe reels, grocery lists, and restaurant menus finally have a clean mushroom. On Instagram Reels and TikTok food content, 🍄‍🟫 has quietly displaced 🍄 in any caption that isn't doing a joke.

Foraging and mycology. The #mushroomforaging tag and "MushTok" pair this emoji with 🌲🧺🪵 for identification videos. MycoLyco, a mycology creator with 600K+ followers who records the sounds of mushrooms growing, is representative of the subgenre. Wild-mushroom accounts use 🍄‍🟫 to flag edible finds and keep 🍄 for the toxic-but-pretty ones.

Functional mushroom wellness. The global functional mushroom market was about $34.6 billion in 2025, projected to hit $84.8 billion by 2035. Lion's mane alone has 189M+ tagged videos on TikTok. Mushroom coffee (Four Sigmatic, Ryze, Mud\Wtr) went from health-store niche to Target shelf. The brown mushroom is the emoji of choice for reishi, chaga, cordyceps, and lion's mane content because it implies "medicinal fungi" rather than "trip."

It does not replace 🍄 in cottagecore, goblincore, Mario, or psychedelic content. Those readings stay on the red one.

Not flirty. It's a food and nature emoji. Someone who forages their own mushrooms is objectively more interesting than someone who doesn't, though.

The brown mushroom exists because the original 🍄 has a species problem.

When Unicode approved MUSHROOM in 2010, vendors drew it based on the dominant cultural reference, the red-and-white fly agaric familiar from Alice in Wonderland (1865), Super Mario Bros (1985), Smurfs houses, and centuries of German Christmas iconography. That design is fine for fantasy and whimsy, but Amanita muscaria is toxic and it reads as psychedelic to enough people that food platforms quietly avoided using 🍄 in recipe content.

The real culinary mushroom of the world is *Agaricus bisporus*, a brown-capped species cultivated in 70+ countries and responsible for about 73% of global mushroom consumption. Most of the mushrooms you've ever eaten, the button in a salad, the cremini in a risotto, the portobello on a burger, are this one species at different ages.

The proposal for a second mushroom went to Unicode as L2/23-032 in early 2023. The argument was straightforward: the food category needs an unambiguous edible mushroom. Approved August 28, 2023. Apple shipped it in iOS 17.4 on March 5, 2024. Jennifer Daniel, who chairs the Unicode Emoji Subcommittee, wrote an essay welcoming it: "She's confident. She's mindful. She's cutesy." The demure framing is not an accident; the whole point was to give food creators a mushroom that doesn't try to be the main character.

The technical move is also interesting. Rather than encoding a whole new code point, Unicode combined the existing 🍄 with 🟫 (brown square) via a Zero Width Joiner. Per Unicode's own guidance, color ZWJ sequences aren't supposed to be used purely to recolor an existing emoji. The brown mushroom qualifies because the change is semantic (edible vs toxic), not cosmetic.

Approved by the Unicode Consortium on 2023-08-28 as part of Emoji 15.1. ZWJ sequence: U+1F344U+1F344 (Mushroom) + U+200DU+200D + U+1F7EBU+1F7EB (Brown Square). Three code points. Apple shipped it in iOS 17.4 on 2024-03-05. Google added it to Noto around the same time.

• •*Agaricus bisporus*, the species 🍄‍🟫 depicts, accounts for roughly 73% of global mushroom consumption. It's cultivated in more than 70 countries. Most mushrooms you've ever eaten are this one species.
• •Button, cremini, and portobello are the same mushroom at different ages. Buttons are toddlers, creminis are teenagers, portobellos are adults. They lose water and gain flavor as they mature.
• •The brown mushroom emoji was approved specifically because food platforms were reluctant to use 🍄 in recipes. Jennifer Daniel's essay frames 🍄‍🟫 as offering "earthy simplicity beyond her companion's fairyland legacy."
• •Fungi are biologically closer to animals than to plants. Suzanne Simard's research on mycorrhizal networks, dubbed the "Wood Wide Web," showed that mother trees actively share carbon and nutrients with seedlings through underground fungal threads.
• •Fantastic Fungi (2019) got a rare 100% on Rotten Tomatoes and brought mycology to Netflix audiences in over 100 countries, helping kick off the mushroom wellness boom.
• •Unicode didn't create a new mushroom code point. 🍄‍🟫 is a ZWJ sequence: 1F3441F344 + 200D200D + 1F7EB1F7EB. Three code points, one visual glyph.
• •The global mushroom coffee market was about $3.2B in 2025, forecast to hit $5.6B by 2035. Four Sigmatic, Ryze, and Mud\Wtr are the best-known brands.
• •Lion's mane has 189M+ tagged videos on TikTok. MycoLyco, who records the sounds of mushrooms growing, has 600K+ followers and treats mycology as performance art.
• •Stella McCartney and Hermès have both used mushroom leather (Mylo, Reishi) made from mycelium. Fungi are quietly becoming a luxury material.

• •ZWJ sequence: U+1F344U+1F344 + U+200DU+200D + U+1F7EBU+1F7EB. Three code points, one grapheme on supported platforms.
• •Unsupported platforms render it as 🍄🟫 (two separate glyphs). Users can still read the intent.
• •Released in Emoji 15.1 (September 2023). Apple support starts iOS 17.4 (March 2024). Test on at least one pre-17.4 device if your audience skews older.
• •Don't swap the ZWJ order; 1F7EB-200D-1F3441F7EB-200D-1F344 is not a valid sequence and will always render as two glyphs.

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