Butter Emoji

The butter emoji shows a pale-yellow stick of butter on a small dish or foil wrapper, depending on the vendor. It's one of the later food emojis, approved in Unicode 12.0 in 2019 as U+1F9C8U+1F9C8, four years after its more famous cousin 🧀.

In texting, 🧈 mostly means two things: literal butter (baking, cooking, toast) and smooth. "Smooth like butter" predates the BTS song by decades, but BTS's 2021 single) welded the emoji to the phrase permanently. After May 2021, 🧈 got used for anything effortless: a clean dunk, a perfect eyeliner wing, a parallel park on the first try.

A third reading is the 2022 butter board trend, when TikTok creator Justine Doiron turned butter into a charcuterie canvas. 🧈 got spread across wooden boards (literally) with honey, sea salt, and edible flowers, and the emoji briefly became the tag for dinner-party nostalgia.

The butter emoji proposal (L2/18-112) argued it was the missing half of the cheese-butter-milk trio. It passed on that logic alone.

🧈 has a weirdly distinct social media trajectory for a 2019 food emoji.

Phase one was quiet: from 2019 to early 2021, it mostly appeared in baking content, Thanksgiving menus, and "add butter" recipe reactions. Usage was below 🧀 by roughly 2–3x on Google Trends, per our family trends chart below.

Phase two was BTS. "Butter") dropped on May 21, 2021, and within 24 hours the music video broke five Guinness World Records, including most YouTube views in 24 hours (108.2 million). The song spent 10 weeks at #1 on the Billboard Hot 100 and hit 1 billion YouTube views on November 28, 2024. The emoji's Google Trends spiked to more than 2x baseline during Q2 2021 and has sat at an elevated floor ever since.

Phase three was the 2022 butter board explosion. Justine Doiron's original butter board video hit 7.6 million TikTok views and 2.7 million on Instagram, triggering a wave of imitators. For about six weeks in September and October 2022, 🧈 was the most-used food emoji on dinner-party TikTok.

Phase four is the Gen Z slang "buttah," meaning smooth, attractive, effortlessly good. "Her outfit is buttah 🧈" or "that shot was buttah." Basketball TikTok uses it for shooters with a clean release.

Butter is about as old as cheese, with evidence of butter production going back roughly 6,000 years. The emoji, embarrassingly late by comparison, arrived in 2019.

The emoji's official proposal, L2/18-112, was submitted in 2018 by Jennifer Daniel (then of Google, now chair of the Unicode Emoji Subcommittee) and argued that butter belonged alongside cheese and milk as a foundational dairy product. The proposal noted butter's presence in global cuisine, from French beurre blanc to Indian ghee to Tibetan po cha, and that it was the single most-requested missing food emoji in Google's 2018 user research.

Unicode 12.0 approved butter on March 5, 2019, and it began rolling out on Apple, Google, Samsung, and Microsoft through the second half of 2019. Apple's design shows a pale-yellow stick on a dish. Google went with a foil-wrapped pat. Samsung's version has the stick unwrapped, sitting flat. None of them match the European-style block that most of the world actually buys.

The emoji's breakout moment came just two years later, when BTS released "Butter" and made the emoji a permanent fixture of Korean and Western pop culture simultaneously.

1. 2018Jennifer Daniel submits butter emoji proposal L2/18-112 to Unicode, arguing it belongs alongside cheese 🧀 and milk 🥛↗
2. 2019Butter approved in Unicode 12.0 on March 5 as U+1F9C8. Ships on Apple iOS 13.2, Google Android 10, and Samsung One UI 2 later that year↗
3. 2021BTS releases "Butter" on May 21, breaking five Guinness World Records in 24 hours. The emoji gets welded to the phrase "smooth like butter" for a generation↗
4. 2022Justine Doiron's butter board TikTok video hits 7.6M views in September, triggering a charcuterie-adjacent trend that runs through the 2022 holiday season↗
5. 2024BTS's "Butter" music video crosses 1 billion YouTube views on November 28, cementing the emoji's long-tail association with the song↗

In the United States, butter comes in sticks. East Coast sticks are long and thin (4.8" x 1.3") while West Coast sticks are short and fat (3.125" x 1.5"), a historical accident from packaging machines in Midwest dairies versus 1960s California dairies. A pound contains four sticks. American butter typically has around 80% butterfat, the USDA minimum.

In Europe, butter sells in half-pound foil-wrapped blocks, not sticks. European butter also has higher fat (typically 82–84%, sometimes up to 86%), often cultured, and usually sits on the counter instead of the fridge. The emoji's stick design is very American by default, which European users sometimes note.

In India, butter is overwhelmingly ghee (clarified butter). Regular "white butter" (makkhan) is tied to Krishna mythology, where the child-god steals butter from his mother's churn. The "maakhan chor" (butter thief) imagery is one of the most popular depictions of young Krishna in Indian art.

In Tibet and Mongolia, yak butter is central. It goes into po cha (butter tea), religious ceremonies (butter lamps), and used to be molded into elaborate butter sculptures for Tibetan New Year. None of this reads from the emoji, but it's why butter is globally universal in a way that, say, a bagel isn't.

In K-pop culture, 🧈 is permanently shorthand for BTS and "smooth like butter." In ARMY accounts, the emoji often tags anniversary posts on May 21.

In British English, watch out: "butters" is slang for unattractive. The emoji itself doesn't carry that meaning, but if someone texts "she's butters 🧈," they are not complimenting her.

• •BTS's "Butter" hit 1 billion YouTube views on November 28, 2024, taking 3 years, 6 months, 7 days, and 10 hours from its 2021 release.
• •The music video broke five Guinness World Records in its first 24 hours, including most YouTube views in 24 hours (108.2 million) and most Spotify first-day streams for a song (11.04 million).
• •Justine Doiron's original butter board video pulled 7.6 million TikTok views and 2.7 million Instagram views in 2022, launching the "spread food on a board" trend that ran through 2024.
• •The butter emoji proposal was submitted by Jennifer Daniel, who now chairs the Unicode Emoji Subcommittee. Her argument: butter was the most-requested missing food emoji in Google's user research.
• •Americans buy butter in sticks. Europeans buy it in blocks. Indians buy ghee. Tibetans use yak butter for tea, lamps, and sculptures.
• •"Bread and butter" as an idiom meaning "basic livelihood" dates to 1533, first recorded in Thomas More's writing. The figurative sense hit by the late 1600s.
• •In the UK, "butters" is slang for unattractive. Origin is debated but likely a shortening of "butt ugly." The emoji itself doesn't carry the slur, but context can.
• •Tibetan butter sculptures can reach 30 feet tall, molded from yak butter colored with mineral pigments, displayed at monasteries during Tibetan New Year.
• •Before the 1990s, US federal rules made margarine illegal to sell yellow in multiple states. Dairy lobbies fought for decades to keep butter visually unique. The last holdout was Wisconsin.

• •BTS, "Butter" (2021). "Smooth like butter, like a criminal undercover." The chorus is the most-quoted butter lyric in pop history, held #1 on Billboard for 10 weeks, and the song became 2021's top Song of the Summer.
• •Butter board trend (2022). Justine Doiron's butter board video ruled autumn 2022. She credited the idea to chef Joshua McFadden's Six Seasons cookbook. Double-dipping discourse followed, as it always does.
• •Last Tango in Paris (1972). Bernardo Bertolucci's film has the most infamous butter scene in cinema. The 🧈 emoji didn't exist then, but the cultural residue means some film-twitter users still react with it when the movie comes up.
• •Krishna the butter thief. In Hindu mythology, the young Krishna is famous for stealing freshly-churned butter (makkhan). The "maakhan chor" imagery appears in countless Indian paintings, carvings, and temple reliefs.
• •Paula Deen's butter obsession. The Food Network chef became a butter meme in the 2010s for adding entire sticks to every recipe. "A stick of buttah, y'all" became a quotable catchphrase long before BTS.
• •"I Can't Believe It's Not Butter!" (1981 to present). The margarine brand built its entire identity around the joke that you can't tell the difference. Fabio's 1990s-era ads made it a cultural artifact in its own right.

• •Butter is U+1F9C8U+1F9C8, added in Unicode 12.0 / Emoji 12.0 (2019). Lives in the "Supplemental Symbols and Pictographs" block alongside cheese.
• •Shortcodes: :butter::butter: on most platforms.
• •Vendor designs diverge. Apple shows a stick on a dish. Google shows a foil-wrapped pat. Samsung shows an unwrapped slab. Test your UI across vendors if butter appearance matters.
• •For BTS fandom features around May 21 each year, pair with U+1F49CU+1F49C (💜), the official ARMY color.
• •Pair with U+1F9C0U+1F9C0 (🧀) and U+1F95BU+1F95B (🥛) for the complete dairy trio, often grouped together in recipe UIs.

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