Drooling Face Emoji

A yellow face with closed eyes, raised eyebrows, and a string of saliva dripping from the corner of its mouth. 🤤 is desire made visible. You want something so badly your body is betraying you.

The drool serves double duty. For food, it's Pavlovian: "That pizza 🤤" or "Homemade pasta 🤤." Seeing something delicious triggers the salivary reflex, and 🤤 captures the moment your mouth waters. For people, it's more direct: "Have you seen their gym pics 🤤" or "That outfit 🤤." Here the drool signals physical attraction, a desire so unfiltered that composure has left the building.

Dictionary.com notes that the drool also appears in sleep contexts (people drool on their pillow) and even carries a pejorative edge: "drooling idiot" implies stupidity through loss of bodily control. But the two dominant readings remain food and attraction, with food accounting for the majority of usage.

🤤 was added in Unicode 9.0 (2016) as part of Emoji 3.0, derived from proposal L2/15-054. It filled a real gap: before 🤤, there was no emoji that specifically conveyed "I want that" with physical urgency. 😋 savors food already in your mouth. 😍 admires with hearts. 🤤 wants something it doesn't have yet, and the body is already responding.

🤤 splits neatly into two lanes.

The food lane. Food Instagram, recipe TikToks, restaurant reviews, and anyone posting what they're about to eat. "Sunday brunch 🤤" or "Chocolate lava cake 🤤" or responding to someone's food photo with just 🤤. This is the safe, widely used meaning. Nobody misreads a drooling face under a food photo. The #foodporn hashtag on Instagram has over 300 million posts, and 🤤 is one of its most common companion emojis.

The thirst lane. Reacting to someone's attractive photo, a gym selfie, a well-dressed outfit, or a celebrity post. 🤤 here means "I find you extremely attractive and I've lost all subtlety about it." It's more direct than 😍 (romantic admiration) and more physical than 🥵 (overwhelmed by heat). 🤤 specifically says: I want. In the thirst trap comment section, it sits between 🔥 (you're hot) and 😍 (I love how you look). 🤤 adds the raw, physical wanting that neither of those conveys.

The dual meaning creates occasional awkwardness. Responding to a friend's vacation food photo with 🤤 is normal. Responding to a coworker's LinkedIn headshot with 🤤 is a meeting with HR. Emojis can constitute sexual harassment in legal contexts, and 🤤 directed at a person is one of the emojis most likely to cross that line.

Context-dependent, but always intense. On a food post: friendly (food craving). On a person's photo: flirty to thirsty (physical desire). The drool makes 🤤 inherently about wanting, which means the only question is what you're wanting. Food = safe. People = loaded. There's no neutral 🤤.

• •On your food photo → food craving (friendly, safe)
• •On your selfie → finds you attractive (flirty, direct)
• •On your outfit post → likes your style or finds you hot (depends on other signals)
• •As a standalone reply → ambiguous, ask what they're drooling at

Drooling as a visual shorthand for desire predates digital communication by centuries. In manga and anime, drool indicates craving. In Western cartoons, Homer Simpson drools over donuts with his signature "Mmm... donuts." The convention is universal: uncontrolled salivation equals intense desire.

The science is real. Ivan Pavlov's famous 1890s experiments with dogs demonstrated that salivation could be triggered by association (a bell), not just by food itself. He inserted tiny tubes into dogs' cheeks to measure saliva production and found that the dogs began drooling at the sound of footsteps before food even appeared. He called this "psychic secretion." Every time you see a food photo and your mouth waters, you're experiencing what Pavlov measured: classical conditioning. 🤤 is Pavlov's emoji.

When Unicode added 🤤 in 2016 as part of Emoji 3.0, derived from proposal L2/15-054, it joined a mature standard that already had 😋 (tongue licking lips, enjoying), 😛 (tongue out, playful), and 😪 (sleepy droplet). 🤤 filled the specific niche of wanting something you don't yet have. The closed eyes with raised eyebrows create a face of anticipatory pleasure: not eating yet, but imagining it so vividly that the body responds.

The cross-platform design story has its own drama. Samsung's original 🤤 showed a startled, blue-gradient face that looked more frightened than hungry. In February 2018, actress Jessica Chastain tweeted from her Samsung phone and discovered the emoji she sent looked completely different on other devices. She publicly responded: "Now I look like a pervert." Samsung redesigned the emoji less than two weeks later.

Approved in Unicode 9.0 (2016) as U+1F924U+1F924 DROOLING FACE. Part of Emoji 3.0. Derived from proposal L2/15-054. A relatively late addition that filled the gap between 😋 (savoring food you have) and pure desire (wanting something you don't have). Samsung's original design was so different from Apple's that it caused a public incident with Jessica Chastain in 2018 and was redesigned within two weeks.

1. 2016Approved in Unicode 9.0 / Emoji 3.0. First appeared on iOS 10.2 and Android 7.0.↗
2. 2017Samsung Experience 8.0 ships a startled, blue-gradient design that looks nothing like drooling↗
3. 2018Jessica Chastain tweets from Samsung, discovers cross-platform design chaos. 'Now I look like a pervert.' Samsung redesigns within two weeks.↗
4. 2018Samsung Experience 9.0 aligns 🤤 with Apple's closed-eyes-and-drool design. Part of the broader 2018 emoji convergence.↗

In Western texting culture, 🤤 splits between food craving and physical attraction, with the attraction reading more prominent in American and British messaging. "Thirst" as slang for sexual desire is an English-language internet phenomenon that maps directly onto 🤤.

In Japan, where emoji originated, the drool face leans more toward anticipation and excitement rather than sexual wanting. Manga drool conventions are primarily about food desire or comedic exaggeration, not physical attraction.

In food-centric cultures (Italian, French, Japanese, Thai, Mexican), 🤤 is used more frequently and more casually in food contexts. In countries where food photography is a cultural practice (Japan's food culture is literally documented in the word mukbang, borrowed from Korean), 🤤 appears constantly in food content comments.

The sexual harassment dimension varies by culture. In some cultures, expressing physical attraction openly through emoji is flirtatious and acceptable. In American corporate culture, emojis can constitute sexual harassment in legal contexts. 🤤 directed at a coworker's appearance is a documented risk factor.

• •🤤 was added in Unicode 9.0 (2016) from proposal L2/15-054, six years after the original emoji batch. It filled the specific niche of wanting something you don't have, sitting between 😋 (enjoying) and 😍 (admiring).
• •Ivan Pavlov's 1890s experiments measured saliva by inserting tiny tubes into dogs' cheeks. He found that dogs salivated at the sound of footsteps before food arrived. He called this 'psychic secretion,' which is basically what happens when you scroll past a food photo and feel your mouth water.
• •Samsung's original 🤤 design showed a startled, blue-gradient face that looked frightened rather than hungry. In 2018, actress Jessica Chastain discovered her tweet looked completely different across platforms and posted: 'Now I look like a pervert.' Samsung redesigned within two weeks.
• •😋 outsearches 🤤 by 2:1 on Google Trends (88 vs 42). People express satisfaction more often than craving. In the emoji food economy, having is more searchable than wanting.
• •The #foodporn hashtag on Instagram has over 300 million posts. 🤤 is one of the most common companion emojis in food content comment sections.
• •Your body produces 0.5 to 1.5 liters of saliva per day. That's roughly 35,000 liters over a lifetime, enough to fill a small swimming pool. Seeing or smelling food increases saliva flow within seconds.
• •Emojis can constitute sexual harassment in legal contexts. 🤤 directed at a person's appearance in a workplace setting is one of the emojis most likely to cross that line.

• •The biggest risk with 🤤: sending it about food when it lands next to someone's selfie. Instagram comment sections mix food and people photos, and a misplaced 🤤 can read very differently than intended. When commenting on food, add a food emoji for clarity: 🤤🍕 vs just 🤤.
• •The sleep-drool meaning (drooling on your pillow) is valid but rarely used. If you mean 'tired,' 😴 or 😪 are clearer. 🤤 will almost always be read as craving first.
• •Some cultures read 🤤 as mockery (the 'drooling idiot' meaning). In contexts where drool implies stupidity, the emoji can feel like an insult. This is uncommon but documented.
• •Samsung's pre-2018 🤤 looked like a shocked face with a blue gradient, not a drooling face. If you sent 🤤 to a Samsung user before 2018, they may have received something that looked like 😨. The designs have since converged.

• •Homer Simpson's 'Mmm... donuts' accompanied by visible drool is the definitive pop culture drool. The character has drooled over food in over 700 episodes of The Simpsons since 1989, making cartoon drool = food craving an indelible cultural association.
• •Pavlov's dogs experiment (1890s) is the scientific foundation for 🤤. Ivan Pavlov measured dogs' saliva and discovered classical conditioning: the dogs drooled at a bell they'd learned to associate with food. 🤤 is Pavlov's emoji, and every food photo that makes your mouth water is his experiment replicated on your phone screen.
• •Jessica Chastain's 2018 Samsung emoji incident became one of the most cited examples of cross-platform emoji design problems. She tweeted 'Is this a Samsung thing?! The emoji is completely different! Now I look like a pervert.' The W Magazine coverage and subsequent Samsung redesign made 🤤 briefly the most discussed emoji in tech news.
• •The Instagram #foodporn movement (300M+ posts) turned food photography into a mainstream cultural practice. 🤤 became the standard comment-section reaction to visually appealing food, embedding the emoji in the food content ecosystem that defines modern Instagram culture.
• •The 'thirst trap' genre of social media content (deliberately attractive selfies designed to generate desire) uses 🤤 as one of its signature reaction emojis. The term 'thirsty' as slang for desperately wanting someone is documented by Dictionary.com and perfectly maps onto 🤤's physical-wanting register.

• •🤤 is U+1F924U+1F924. Unicode name: DROOLING FACE. Shortcodes: :drooling_face::drooling_face: (Slack, Discord) or :drool::drool: (some platforms). Part of Unicode 9.0 / Emoji 3.0 (2016).
• •For content moderation: 🤤 under food content is benign. 🤤 under a person's photo may signal harassment. Context-aware moderation should treat 🤤 differently depending on whether the parent content shows food or people. The Super Lawyers article on emoji harassment is a useful reference.
• •Cross-platform rendering: Samsung's pre-2018 design was dramatically different (frightened rather than drooling). If your app needs to handle 🤤 consistently, ensure you test across Android versions and OEM skins.

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