Downwards Button Emoji

The downwards button (🔽) is a red triangle inside a square, pointing down. It's the counterpart to 🔼 and the button-style cousin of ⬇️. What makes it different from the flat arrow is that raised, pressable shape: 🔽 looks like something you tap, not somewhere you're headed. That's why it lives in dropdown menus, volume controls, accordion widgets, and sort toggles across almost every app interface ever made. In texting it reads as "less," "lower," "decrease," "scroll down," or a polite "look below." Approved as part of Unicode 6.0 in 2010 under the original name DOWN-POINTING SMALL RED TRIANGLE, and added to Emoji 1.0 in 2015.

The red color isn't random. It's a holdover from stock tickers and financial UIs, where red triangles meant "price moved." That's also why 🔻 and 🔽 share a color story: they're both the "something dropped" emoji, one flat, one button-shaped.

In creator culture, 🔽 acts as a "look down there" pointer. Instagram captions use it to nudge people toward a link in bio, TikTok creators drop it to flag the comment pinned below, YouTube descriptions open with it to lead into timestamps. It's less dominant than ⬇️ for that job, which is the default CTA arrow in creator bios and captions, but 🔽 wins when the writer wants something that feels like a UI control rather than a direction. Outside of creator captions, 🔽 shows up when people imitate dropdown menus in text, mock volume controls ("🔽🔽🔽 my roommate's music at 3am"), or stand in for a downvote on platforms that don't have one. In February 2025, Instagram started testing an actual dislike button that looks almost exactly like 🔽: a downward-pointing arrow next to comments, meant to privately signal "rank this lower." For users in that test, the emoji and the UI became the same thing.

The four triangle buttons (🔼 🔽 🔺 🔻) all trace back to a single Unicode decision in version 6.0: encoding the "red triangle" symbols that had been floating around Japanese carrier emoji sets since the early 2000s. On Japanese phones, little red triangles were used for price-change indicators and menu controls. Unicode preserved four of them: two with a surrounding square (the "buttons" 🔼 🔽) and two without (the "plain" triangles 🔺 🔻). The square frame was meant to mimic the raised look of a physical UI button, which is why 🔽 and 🔼 still feel clickable in a way that ⬆️ and ⬇️ don't.

The original names all contained the word "RED": DOWN-POINTING SMALL RED TRIANGLE, UP-POINTING SMALL RED TRIANGLE, etc. Over time, vendors started rendering them in different colors: Microsoft went gray, some platforms went blue. Unicode quietly renamed them to just "Upwards Button" and "Downwards Button" in 2017 to match what was actually shipping.

Encoded in Unicode 6.0 (October 2010) as U+1F53D with the original Unicode name DOWN-POINTING SMALL RED TRIANGLE. It lives in the User Interface Symbols subblock of the Miscellaneous Symbols and Pictographs block. Added to Emoji 1.0 in 2015. In 2017, Unicode renamed most of the "button" emojis from "red triangle" to their current generic "button" names, reflecting how vendors had quietly stopped coloring them red.

1. 2010Approved in Unicode 6.0 as DOWN-POINTING SMALL RED TRIANGLE (U+1F53D).↗
2. 2015Added to Emoji 1.0, becoming available across major keyboards as 🔽.
3. 2017Unicode renames it to "Downwards Button," dropping "red" after vendors diverged on color.
4. 2025Instagram tests a comment dislike arrow that visually mirrors 🔽, making the emoji and UI identical for users in the experiment.↗

• •The original Unicode name was DOWN-POINTING SMALL RED TRIANGLE. The word "RED" was dropped in 2017 because Microsoft and others had already rendered it gray.
• •The caret symbol that inspired most dropdown arrows in web design dates back to 1681, originally a proofreading mark for insertions, centuries older than the UI element it now represents.
• •Instagram's 2025 dislike button test uses a downward arrow that's nearly identical to 🔽. For test users, the emoji became a perfect stand-in for the real button.
• •🔽 lives in the "User Interface Symbols" subblock of Unicode, one of the few emoji explicitly filed under UI rather than symbols or pictographs.
• •Accessibility readers pronounce 🔽 as "down-pointing red triangle" or "down button," which is why it's still a common alt-text choice for dropdown icons on websites that care about screen readers.