Confetti Ball Emoji

A golden ball splitting open to release a burst of colorful confetti and streamers. Most people use 🎊 for celebrations, congratulations, and festive occasions, but what they're actually looking at is a specific Japanese object: a kusudama (薬玉), a decorative ball that splits in half at ceremonies.

More precisely, it's a waritama, the confetti-releasing version of a kusudama used at graduations, business openings, and big celebrations in Japan. You pull a string, the ball splits, and confetti and a congratulatory scroll pour out. The design across every emoji platform references this specific object, which explains the two half-shell shapes that don't look like any Western party supply.

In practice, people use 🎊 interchangeably with 🎉 for any kind of celebration. 🎉 is far more popular (about 5-6x the search volume), so 🎊 tends to show up as the second celebration emoji in a string, or when someone wants to add extra festive energy beyond a single 🎉.

🎊 peaks hard on New Year's Eve. Emojipedia data shows its biggest usage spike happens in December, specifically around December 31. Birthday posts, graduation announcements, and wedding congratulations are the other big moments.

On Instagram and TikTok, it's part of celebration emoji combos: 🎉🎊🥳 is a classic triple. It shows up in captions for promotions, milestone posts, and "we did it" announcements.

In dev culture, 🎉 (:tada::tada:) gets all the love via Gitmoji for initial commits and big releases. 🎊 (:confetti_ball::confetti_ball:) exists as a shortcode but doesn't have an assigned Gitmoji meaning, making it the forgotten celebration emoji in tech circles.

🎊 was approved in Unicode 6.0 (2010) as U+1F38AU+1F38A CONFETTI BALL, joining Emoji 1.0 in 2015.

The object it depicts has a specific name: kusudama (薬玉, literally "medicine ball"). In traditional Japan, kusudama were aromatic bunches of herbs and flowers believed to ward off evil spirits. Over time, the concept evolved into decorative paper balls used at celebrations. The waritama version, which splits open to release confetti and scrolls, became standard at business openings, graduation ceremonies, and sports victories in Japan.

The name "confetti" itself has a separate and interesting history. It comes from the Italian word for sugar-coated almonds, which were traditionally thrown at weddings and carnivals in Italy starting in the 14th century. The nobles of Milan threw candies during parades, while commoners used cheaper substitutes like coriander seeds. Paper confetti was invented in Milan in 1875 for the Carnivale di Milano, replacing the real candies. In Italy today, "confetti" still means the almonds, while the paper bits are called "coriandoli" (after the coriander seeds they replaced).

So the emoji depicts a Japanese object named with an Italian word, and the two traditions share no historical connection. They converged purely through modern celebration culture.

1. 1875Paper confetti invented in Milan for the [Carnivale di Milano](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Confetti), replacing actual sugar-coated almonds thrown at earlier carnivals
2. 1999Super Smash Bros. introduces the [Party Ball](https://www.ssbwiki.com/Party_Ball) (くす玉 / kusudama) as an item, embedding the Japanese ceremonial ball in global gaming culture
3. 2010🎊 added to Unicode 6.0 as `U+1F38A` CONFETTI BALL. The design traces back to early Japanese carrier emoji sets by au/KDDI and SoftBank
4. 2015Emoji 1.0 standardizes the kusudama design across Apple, Google, Samsung, Microsoft, Twitter, and WhatsApp
5. 2020Pandemic virtual New Year's Eve pushes 🎊 to record December usage. Zoom countdowns and TikTok streams lean on the emoji as the only available 'ceremonial opening'
6. 2023GitHub Actions standardize 🎊 for milestone release comments in several popular frameworks alongside 🎉, carving out a small dev-culture niche for the emoji

In Japan, 🎊 reads as a kusudama or waritama, the specific ceremonial ball you'd see at a grand opening, graduation, or New Year's event. Japanese users recognize the two-shell design immediately.

In Western countries, most people see it as generic confetti and don't connect it to any specific object. It reads as "party" or "celebration" without the ceremonial weight it carries in Japan.

In Italy, confetti (confetti) means sugar-coated almonds given at weddings and baptisms, not paper bits. An Italian seeing this emoji might not immediately connect it to their confetti tradition, since the paper version is called "coriandoli" there.

In Latin America, piñatas are the closest cultural equivalent to the waritama concept (a decorated object that bursts to release things). The emoji sometimes gets used in piñata contexts even though the objects are completely different.

• •"Confetti" in Italian means sugar-coated almonds, not paper bits. Paper confetti is called "coriandoli" (after coriander seeds, which were the cheap substitute thrown by commoners at Milan carnivals). The paper version was invented in 1875.
• •The kusudama (薬玉) that 🎊 depicts originally meant "medicine ball" in Japanese. Centuries ago, they were bunches of aromatic herbs believed to ward off evil spirits. They evolved into the festive confetti balls used at ceremonies today.
• •In Super Smash Bros., the Party Ball item is a kusudama that has a 10% chance of just exploding instead of dropping items. The developers put in a risk-reward mechanic for what's supposed to be a party favor.
• •The Apollo 11 ticker-tape parade on August 13, 1969 generated 3,249 tons of paper according to NYC Sanitation, still the largest ticker-tape haul in New York history. Over 4 million people watched along the route. No single 🎊 emoji does that number justice.
• •Every Super Bowl, Artistry in Motion prints two pre-loaded 300 lb batches of team-colored confetti. The losing team's confetti gets shredded within hours of the final whistle. The paper is 98% post-consumer recycled.
• •The Emoji Sentiment Ranking v1.0, built on 1.6M tweets across 13 European languages, scored 🎊 at 0.721 positive (77.9% positive tweets, 5.7% negative). Its twin 🎉 scored 0.738. Statistically, they carry essentially identical emotional weight, the gap is tiny.
• •The Tokyo Stock Exchange's IPO ritual includes cracking a real kusudama alongside the bell-ringing. JPX also splits one on the first and last trading day of the year. The emoji's object is actively used at the world's fourth-largest stock exchange.
• •US sprinkles on Funfetti cakes contain erythrosine (Red Dye 3, E127), which has been banned in most EU/UK food uses for decades. In 2021, West Yorkshire Trading Standards raided a British bakery selling imported US sprinkles in an incident the UK press dubbed "Sprinklegate".
• •Pillsbury trademarked FUNFETTI on August 1, 1989, combining "fun" and "confetti" to sell cake mix with rainbow sprinkles baked into the batter. The word is now so common it's easy to forget it's a registered trademark.
• •Times Square's New Year's Eve 2025-2026 drop released nearly 3 tons of confetti, including a first-ever post-midnight 2,000 lb red-white-blue release for America's upcoming 250th anniversary. The pre-midnight drop was purple and yellow.

• •The Party Ball in Super Smash Bros. (Melee, Brawl, Ultimate) is literally the same object as 🎊. In Japanese, the item is called くす玉 (kusudama). It floats up, splits open, and rains items down on fighters. 36% chance of food, 12% chance of Bob-ombs, 10% chance of just exploding.
• •The traditional Japanese kusudama appears regularly at business grand openings and sports victories in Japan. TV coverage of these events shows dignitaries pulling a string to crack open a large golden kusudama, releasing confetti and a congratulatory banner. It's the Japanese equivalent of a ribbon-cutting ceremony.
• •Paper confetti was invented in Milan in 1875 for the Carnivale di Milano. Before that, Italians threw actual sugar-coated almonds (which is what "confetti" still means in Italy). The switch from candy to paper was driven by economics: paper was cheaper to throw at strangers.

• •🎊 is U+1F38AU+1F38A. Common shortcodes: :confetti_ball::confetti_ball: (Slack, Discord, GitHub).
• •In Gitmoji, 🎉 (:tada::tada:) is used for initial commits and big releases. 🎊 doesn't have an assigned Gitmoji meaning, but some teams use it for milestone celebrations in PRs.
• •🎊 is classified under "Activities" in Unicode CLDR, not "Objects" like you might expect.

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