Cigarette Emoji

A lit, filtered cigarette with smoke rising off the tip. 🚬 stands for smoking, tobacco, nicotine, and in a broader cultural sense, a paradox: the habit is near a historical low, the aesthetic is at a ten-year high.

The US adult smoking rate fell below 10% in 2024 for the first time on record, down from 42.4% in 1965. The CDC put the 2024 rate at 9.9%, a 77% decline across six decades. Youth cigarette use is at 1.4%, the lowest the National Youth Tobacco Survey has ever recorded. At the same time, Pinterest searches for "smoking pose" rose 70% year-over-year among US 18-24 year-olds in November 2025, and 51% of the top films in 2024 showed tobacco imagery, up from 41% the year before. 🚬 has outlived its own product.

In texting, 🚬 runs hot and cold. It gets used literally (a real smoke break, a cigarette after dinner), figuratively (stress, defiance, "I need a minute"), and aesthetically (indie sleaze, coquette, dark academia, Lana Del Rey coded, Carrie Bradshaw coded). As a workaround for the missing joint emoji, it also stands in for weed, especially paired with 🌿. Apple softened the design in iOS 5 so the cigarette looks less cinematic. It did not kill the emoji's vibe.

Approved in Unicode 6.0 on October 11, 2010 as codepoint U+1F6AC "SMOKING SYMBOL." The original purpose was to mark a designated smoking area, a direct pair with 🚭. It came out of Japanese carrier sets where smoking-zone pictograms were already standard on train platforms and office walls.

Three very different crowds use 🚬, and they barely overlap.

Aesthetic Gen Z. This is the biggest vertical and the newest one. Indie sleaze is back, coquette is mainstream, and Carrie Bradshaw's red-Marlboro clutch is a reference photo again. Editing a celebrity's photo to add a cigarette is a whole TikTok subgenre. Bloomberg and Newsweek both ran 2025 pieces on the "smoking is cool again" phenomenon, noting the catch: Gen Z likes how smoking looks, not the nicotine. They post 🚬 with 🥀, 🖤, 🍷, and 🎞️ to signal a particular brand of melancholy chic, not an actual pack-a-day habit.

Stress and "I need a minute" posters. 🚬 as shorthand for "step outside and decompress." People who don't smoke still post "need a 🚬 after that email." The cigarette has become the universal pictogram for the ten-minute break from whatever is breaking them. This usage has nothing to do with nicotine and everything to do with the ritual.

Cannabis users. No joint emoji exists. 🚬 is the stand-in, usually paired with 🌿 or 🍃 to disambiguate. Apple has never added a cannabis emoji for legal reasons, so 🚬🌿 has been the 420 shorthand since Unicode 6.0. On 420-leaning accounts it reads as "joint" more often than "cigarette."

Quitting content is the fourth lane. "30 days without 🚬" or "🚬❌" is a common milestone post, usually next to 🫁 (lungs) or 💪. Public-health accounts still use 🚬 in warnings, but the warning tone is now competing with the nostalgia tone in the same feed.

🚬 started life as a piece of regulatory signage. Japanese carriers like SoftBank, KDDI, and NTT DoCoMo built smoking-zone and no-smoking pictograms into their emoji sets in the early 2000s, because Japanese train stations, airports, and offices already used those signs everywhere. Apple carried the carrier set over to iOS 2.2 in 2008 as a Japan-only feature, then quietly turned it on worldwide later.

The formal Unicode path runs through proposal documents L2/07-257 (2007) and L2/09-026 (2009), the long-form "Emoji Symbols" submission that brought the Japanese carrier set into the Unicode standard. U+1F6AC SMOKING SYMBOL was approved as part of Unicode 6.0 on October 11, 2010, in the same batch as most of the emoji people still use today.

The word "SMOKING SYMBOL" in the Unicode name is a giveaway. The original intended meaning was "this area allows smoking," the opposite of 🚭. The informal name "cigarette" took over almost immediately because users were never going to post 🚬 to label a smoking room. They posted it to say "I just had a cigarette," and the zone-sign meaning quietly died.

Apple softened the artwork in iOS 5 (2011) and OS X 10.7 Lion, stubbier, less cinematic, less James Dean. Google's Noto version went even flatter. Twitter's Twemoji stayed relatively stylized. The differences are small but add up when you compare decade to decade.

1. 1999First Japanese carrier (NTT DoCoMo) ships smoking-symbol pictograms as part of its 176-emoji i-mode set.
2. 2007Unicode proposal L2/07-257 'Emoji Symbols' includes the smoking symbol among the Japanese carrier set brought forward.
3. 2008Apple enables the Japanese emoji set on iOS 2.2 in Japan. Smoking symbol is included.
4. 2010Unicode 6.0 approves U+1F6AC SMOKING SYMBOL on October 11. Global availability begins.
5. 2011Apple redesigns the emoji for iOS 5 to look stubbier and less glamorous.
6. 2015Emoji 1.0 released. Smoking symbol officially carries the CLDR name 'cigarette'.
7. 2017Weibo removes a custom smoking emoji under pressure from the Beijing Tobacco Control Association. Tencent QQ follows in November 2017.
8. 2021Emoji 14.0 adds 😮‍💨 'Face Exhaling,' widely read as a vape or sigh companion to 🚬.
9. 2023Smoking-in-bed art trend on X (November 2023, @Kupadraws) revives the 'cigarette after' meme. 🚬🛌 becomes standard.
10. 202451% of top US films contain tobacco imagery. US adult smoking rate drops below 10% for the first time.
11. 2025Pinterest reports 'smoking pose' searches up 70% year-over-year among US 18-24 year-olds. Indie sleaze 2.0 peaks.

• •US adult smoking fell to 9.9% in 2024, the first time below 10% on record. The peak was 42.4% in 1965. That is a 77% decline across six decades.
• •Youth cigarette use hit 1.4% in 2024, the lowest the National Youth Tobacco Survey has ever recorded. The generation posting 🚬 the most is the generation smoking the least.
• •Five actors who played the Marlboro Man died of smoking-related diseases: Wayne McLaren (1992), David McLean (1995), Eric Lawson (2014), Jerome Jackson (2008), and David Millar (1987). Wayne McLaren actively campaigned against smoking from his deathbed.
• •The original Unicode name for 🚬 is SMOKING SYMBOL, not CIGARETTE. The symbol was designed as a 'smoking area allowed' pictogram, a pair with 🚭. Users immediately repurposed it.
• •Tencent removed a smoking sticker from QQ in November 2017 under pressure from the Beijing Tobacco Control Association. The commando with a cigarette was replaced by the same commando holding a green leaf.
• •Cigarettes After Sex, the dream-pop band, formed in El Paso in 2008. Their first EP was recorded in a four-story university stairwell. The group name alone turned 🚬 into a musical mood indicator for a whole subculture.
• •Pinterest searches for 'smoking pose' jumped 70% year-over-year among US 18-24 year-olds in November 2025, while actual youth smoking was at historical lows. The aesthetic and the behavior have fully diverged.
• •Tobacco imagery in top US films rose from 41% (58 of 141) of the top films in 2023 to 51% (77 of 152) in 2024. Tobacco incidents in those films jumped 43% year over year.
• •Apple redesigned its cigarette emoji in iOS 5 (2011) to look stubbier and less cinematic, a subtle nudge away from the James Dean silhouette the original artwork leaned into.

• •Cigarettes After Sex: El Paso dream-pop band formed in 2008, reverb-heavy slowcore, cult following. Singer Greg Gonzalez recorded their first EP in a four-story stairwell at UT El Paso. The band name alone made 🚬🛌 a mood-board shorthand for a decade of sad indie romance.
• •Marlboro Man campaign (1954-1999): the most successful cigarette ad campaign ever and arguably the most tragic. Five actors who played the character (Wayne McLaren 1992, David Millar 1987, David McLean 1995, Jerome Jackson 2008, Eric Lawson 2014) died of smoking-related diseases. 🚬 inherits that cultural echo.
• •'Cigarette after sex' trope: decades of film cutaways from the bedroom to a post-coital smoke. Know Your Meme's 'Smoking In Bed Art Trend' is the current emoji form of the same joke.
• •Carrie Bradshaw, Sex and the City: the red Marlboro as an accessory, not a habit. Gen Z reread the show in 2023-2024 and the cigarette came along with the Fendi baguette.
• •Lana Del Rey: a decade of album art, music videos, and lyrics where the cigarette is practically another instrument. Heart-shaped-sunglasses-plus-🚬 is a full costume.
• •Breakfast at Tiffany's (1961): Audrey Hepburn with the long cigarette holder. Probably the single most-reproduced smoking image in fashion photography.
• •Rebel Without a Cause (1955): James Dean's cigarette as character shorthand. Referenced more by people who have never seen it than by people who have.

• •🚬 is codepoint U+1F6AC. Unicode name: SMOKING SYMBOL. CLDR short name: cigarette.
• •Common shortcodes: :smoking::smoking: on Discord, Slack, GitHub, Mastodon. Some implementations also accept :cigarette::cigarette:.
• •Pairs frequently with 😮‍💨 (ZWJ sequence U+1F62E U+200D U+1F4A8), 🚭 (U+1F6AD), and 🌿 (U+1F33F).
• •On Chinese platforms (QQ, Weibo, WeChat) the standard Unicode emoji renders normally, but platform sticker sets had their equivalent smoking sticker removed in 2017.

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