Eyes Emoji
U+1F440:eyes:About Eyes ๐
Eyes () is part of the People & Body group in Unicode. Added in Unicode E0.6. Type on GitHub and Slack to use it. Click copy above to grab it, paste it anywhere.
Works in iMessage, WhatsApp, Discord, Slack, Instagram, Twitter, Gmail, and every app that supports Unicode.
Often associated with body, eye, face, and 7 more keywords.
Meaning varies across cultures, see cultural notes below.
Scroll down for the full story: meaning, trends, combos, and more.
How it looks
What does it mean?
A pair of eyes looking to the side. ๐ is the universal emoji of paying attention: noticing something interesting, watching drama unfold, or calling attention to something that shouldn't be missed. The sideways glance gives it a sneaky, conspiratorial edge that no other emoji quite has.
Added in Unicode 6.0 (2010) and carried over to Emoji 1.0 in 2015, ๐ was originally a body-part emoji for the Japanese mobile phone carrier sets that seeded the global standard. But nobody uses it to mean "eyes" the way you'd mean "nose" ๐ or "ear" ๐. It's pure function: "look at this."
What makes ๐ unusual is its minimalism. No face, no mouth, no expression. Just two floating eyeballs glancing sideways. That absence is the entire point. A face emoji commits to an emotion. ๐ commits to nothing except attention. You project whatever feeling fits: curiosity, suspicion, attraction, amusement, judgment. In Buffer's 2025 analysis of over 207,000 social media users, ๐ ranked #3 on TikTok and #14 overall across platforms, making it one of the few body-part emojis that outperforms most face emojis.
The sideways glance is key. You're not looking directly at something. You're looking from the corner of your eye. That side-eye quality makes ๐ perfect for gossip, drama-watching, link-sharing, and the moment when you notice something everyone else missed.
๐ is the internet's attention signal. Send a link? Add ๐. Screenshot something juicy? Just ๐. See someone post something messy? React with ๐. No caption needed, no explanation required.
On TikTok, ๐ jumped to the #3 most-used emoji in 2025, behind only โจ and ๐ฅ. The fit is obvious: TikTok is built on capturing attention, and ๐ literally says "look at this." Creators drop it in captions to stop the scroll.
On X (Twitter), ๐ is sports journalism shorthand. When an insider tweets just "๐" with no context, it means something big is about to drop. NBA players like Isaiah Thomas and Andre Drummond made it a trade-deadline ritual, tweeting ๐ to keep fans guessing whether a deal was coming.
On Slack and GitHub, is one of the top 5 most-used reactions in workplaces. It means "I see this" or "I'll take a look." Developers use it on pull requests to signal they're starting a code review.
In dating, ๐ means "I noticed." Reply ๐ to someone's selfie and the message is clear: you're looking, and you like what you see.
๐ means paying attention, noticing something, or directing someone's attention to something. The sideways glance adds a sneaky quality. Common meanings: "look at this," "I see what you did," "I'm watching this drama unfold," or just "I noticed." Context determines whether it's curious, flirty, suspicious, or gossip-related.
What ๐ actually means when people send it
Why a faceless emoji beats face emojis
- ๐ง Your brain is wired to follow eyes: Babies start tracking other people's gaze around 3-6 months old, long before speech. ๐ hooks that same reflex in adults, which is why even a text message with just ๐ feels like someone pointed at something.
- ๐บThe MrBeast thumbnail in emoji form: Wide-eye thumbnails dominate YouTube because faces are processed in about 100ms, faster than any headline. ๐ is that strategy compressed into one character, usable in any caption.
- ๐ญAmbiguity is the feature: Where ๐ locks you into laughter and ๐ locks you into annoyance, ๐ lets the reader decide whether you're flirting, snitching, or just curious. Six meanings per send is more reuses per character.
- ๐It needs zero translation: No idiom, no facial expression norms, no cultural shorthand. Sideways eyes mean "look" in every country that has ever drawn a face. That's why it crossed from Japanese carrier sets in 2003 to global Unicode in 2010 with its meaning fully intact.
The Eye Emoji Family
What it means from...
"I'm watching." When a crush sends ๐ after your selfie or story, they're telling you they noticed, they looked closely, and they liked it. It's flirtation without commitment.
Usually playful. "Did you see that?" or "I saw what you just did." Between partners, ๐ is often sharing gossip, reacting to drama together, or teasing about something noticed.
The gossip signal. Friends send ๐ when there's drama to discuss, when someone posted something messy, or when sharing a link that demands attention. It's the text version of grabbing someone's arm and pointing.
"I see this" or "I'm looking into it." On Slack and GitHub, ๐ is a professional acknowledgment. It can also mean "did you see what just happened in that meeting" when sent in a private DM.
Interest or intrigue. A stranger reacting with ๐ to your post means it caught their attention. Depending on context, it could be curiosity, attraction, or just "this is worth looking at."
"Did you see this?" Parents and siblings use ๐ to share news, point out something funny, or react to family gossip. Less loaded than in dating contexts, more "look" than "looking."
When a guy sends ๐, he's paying attention. If it's a reply to your selfie or story, it's usually flirty: "I noticed, and I like what I see." In a conversation, it can mean "tell me more" or "that's interesting." Don't assume it's always romantic though. He might just be sharing something he wants you to look at.
Same range as from anyone: curiosity, interest, or gossip mode. If she sends ๐ after you share news, she wants details. If she reacts ๐ to your photo, she noticed. In group chats, it's almost always "did you see that" energy. The meaning depends on the conversation, not the sender's gender.
Both, depending on context. Under a selfie or thirst trap, ๐ is flirty: "I'm looking, and I like it." In a group chat sharing news, it's just "look at this." On a work Slack, it's purely professional. The same emoji means different things on different platforms and in different relationships. When in doubt, look at what came before and after it.
๐ ranking by platform (2025)
Where ๐ actually lives on the internet
Emoji combos
How sender intent maps to reader interpretation
Origin story
๐ is one of the original emoji from the Japanese mobile phone era. The carrier au by KDDI included eyes in their proprietary emoji set as early as 2003, years before the global Unicode standard adopted it. When Unicode 6.0 was finalized in 2010, ๐ was part of the wave of characters standardized from Japan's three major carriers: SoftBank, KDDI, and NTT Docomo.
The design is deliberately bodiless. Most emoji in the "People & Body" category include a face or a full figure. ๐ is just two eyeballs floating in space, looking sideways. That minimalism isn't an oversight. It's what makes the emoji so versatile: without a mouth or brow to set an emotional context, the viewer projects their own interpretation.
One of the strangest chapters in ๐ history: Google's Android emoji set once rendered it as a single eye, despite the Unicode name being "EYES" (plural). The company fixed this in their 2017 emoji redesign, when they retired the beloved blob emoji and unified their entire set to match the rounder, cross-platform-friendly style. If you sent ๐ to an Android user before late 2017, they might have seen a cyclops.
The emoji built to steal ๐'s job, and what happened next
Design history
Around the world
United States
๐ is the go-to gossip and attention-directing emoji. It spikes during celebrity drama, sports trade deadlines, and political leaks. In NBA culture specifically, players and insiders tweet just "๐" to signal imminent trade news, creating a whole subgenre of sports speculation.
Japan and East Asia
Research on cross-cultural emotion reading shows that East Asian cultures focus on the eyes to read emotion, while Western cultures focus on the mouth. This makes ๐ a potentially more emotionally charged emoji in Japan, Korea, and China than in Western contexts, where it's often just casual attention-directing.
Latin America
The "Un Vato Bien Despierto" (A Wide Awake Guy) meme originated in Spanish-speaking meme communities in 2024, using ๐ as the core visual element on void memes. The trend crossed language barriers by late 2024, proving the emoji's universality.
Global internet culture
๐ transcends language barriers more effectively than almost any other emoji. It requires no cultural context to understand: eyes looking sideways means "pay attention." This universality makes it one of the few digital gestures that truly works everywhere.
During trade deadlines and free agency, NBA players (and insiders) tweet just ๐ to signal that something is about to happen without saying what. It started as real hints about trades and evolved into a culture where even the ambiguity is the entertainment. Fans analyze every ๐ tweet for clues about roster moves.
How an Ad Council brief became a Unicode emoji
- ๐
Six-week reach: By early December 2015, the campaign had logged [600M+ online impressions and 10M video views](https://www.npr.org/sections/alltechconsidered/2015/10/23/450941822/fighting-online-bullying-one-emoji-at-a-time), with 57,000 documented emoji uses on Kik alone.
- ๐คCelebrity amplification: Backers included The Fine Bros, Grace Helbig, GloZell Green, Rachel Platten, and anti-bullying advocate Lizzie Velasquez. The campaign leaned on YouTubers, not traditional A-list celebrities.
- ๐๏ธFast-track to Unicode: Twitter's custom emoji never works system-wide, so the Ad Council pushed Unicode to standardize the design. ๐๏ธโ๐จ๏ธ landed in [Unicode 9.0 in June 2016](https://emojipedia.org/eye-in-speech-bubble), less than a year from launch. Most emoji proposals take 2-3 years.
- ๐ตWhy it breaks on older phones: ๐๏ธโ๐จ๏ธ is a ZWJ sequence (๐๏ธ + speech-bubble component), so older devices that don't support that emoji-ligature mechanism fall back to showing the two pieces separately. Casual users often see it as eye + speech-bubble box, never realizing it was meant to be one symbol.
The 47-year head start before bombastic side eye
The bombastic domino effect
Google search interest: "eyes emoji" vs "eye emoji"
Often confused with
๐๏ธ is a single eye staring forward. It's intense, surveillance-like, and spiritually loaded (third eye, Eye of Providence). ๐ is a pair of eyes glancing sideways. One watches. Two are curious. ๐๏ธ = Big Brother. ๐ = the group chat.
๐๏ธ is a single eye staring forward. It's intense, surveillance-like, and spiritually loaded (third eye, Eye of Providence). ๐ is a pair of eyes glancing sideways. One watches. Two are curious. ๐๏ธ = Big Brother. ๐ = the group chat.
๐ซฃ (face with peeking eye) hides behind a hand and peeks through one finger. It's shy, nervous peeking. ๐ is bold, shameless looking. ๐ซฃ says "I shouldn't be watching this." ๐ says "I'm absolutely watching this."
๐ซฃ (face with peeking eye) hides behind a hand and peeks through one finger. It's shy, nervous peeking. ๐ is bold, shameless looking. ๐ซฃ says "I shouldn't be watching this." ๐ says "I'm absolutely watching this."
๐คจ (raised eyebrow) is skepticism with a face. It commits to doubt. ๐ is more ambiguous: you could be suspicious, impressed, intrigued, or just paying attention. The face narrows the meaning. The eyes leave it open.
๐คจ (raised eyebrow) is skepticism with a face. It commits to doubt. ๐ is more ambiguous: you could be suspicious, impressed, intrigued, or just paying attention. The face narrows the meaning. The eyes leave it open.
๐ is two eyes glancing sideways. It's casual, curious, gossip-ready. ๐๏ธ is a single eye staring forward. It's intense, surveillance-like, and spiritually loaded (third eye, Eye of Providence, Big Brother vibes). ๐ peeks. ๐๏ธ watches. Most people use ๐ in everyday texting and ๐๏ธ for aesthetic or meme contexts like ๐๏ธ๐๐๏ธ.
Where ๐ sits among the watching emojis
Do's and don'ts
- โUse ๐ to share links, screenshots, or news that deserve attention
- โReact with ๐ on Slack or GitHub to signal you're reviewing something
- โSend a standalone ๐ when you notice something you want to discuss
- โUse it in gossip-sharing contexts with friends
- โDon't spam ๐ on every post from a crush. Once is intriguing, three times is surveillance
- โAvoid using ๐ in serious professional emails. It reads as too casual for formal contexts
- โDon't use ๐ as a passive-aggressive response in workplace disputes. It can come across as threatening
- โDon't interpret every ๐ reaction as romantic interest. Context matters
In developer culture, reacting with ๐ means "I'm looking at this" or "I'll review it." On GitHub, it's one of the built-in PR reactions. On Slack, it's a top-5 reaction meaning "I see this" or "I'm taking this task." It's faster than typing a response and universally understood in tech teams.
Caption ideas
Type it as text
Fun facts
- โข๐ is just eyes. No face, no nose, no mouth. And yet it's one of the most used emoji on the internet. Two floating eyeballs are enough to communicate "look at this" to anyone on earth.
- โขGoogle's Android emoji set once rendered ๐ as a single eye, despite the Unicode name being "EYES" (plural). They fixed it in the 2017 redesign that also killed the beloved blob emoji. RIP blobs.
- โขOn GitHub, ๐ is so commonly used in code reviews that developers have requested it automatically subscribe you to a thread. The logic: if you've put eyes on something, you want to see what happens next.
- โขThe "bombastic side eye" TikTok trend of January 2023 generated over 205,000 videos and turned ๐ into the emoji of dramatic judgment. The audio went global, translated into dozens of languages.
- โขOn Slack, is one of the top 5 most-used reactions across workplaces. At Slack's own company, reacting with ๐ to a help request means "I've got this, I'm taking a look."
- โขDuring the February 2017 NBA trade deadline, multiple players tweeted just "๐" with no context, creating mass speculation about pending trades. One fan tweeted: "An NBA player tweeted the eyes emoji so everyone thinks a big trade could be coming. (We are so dumb)"
- โขThe "Let's Take a Look ๐" meme started with a Leon Kennedy GIF on September 25, 2024, and peaked in October 2025 with variations earning over 251,000 likes on a single post.
- โขJapanese mobile carrier au by KDDI had eyes in their proprietary emoji set as early as 2003. That's seven years before Unicode made it official.
- โขResearch shows East Asian cultures read emotion primarily from the eyes, while Western cultures focus on the mouth. This means ๐ might carry more emotional weight in Japan or Korea than its casual use in the US suggests.
- โขA 2023 ACM study of GitHub pull request reactions found ๐ represents only about 0.68% of all reactions, but its use correlates with longer discussion threads. The emoji that says "I'm looking" literally predicts that a thread is about to get complicated.
- โขDevelopmental psychology has a name for why ๐ works as a pure attention signal: gaze following. Babies start tracking other people's eye direction by around 3-6 months, and the behavior correlates with later language development. The emoji piggybacks on a cognitive reflex older than writing.
- โขMrBeast's thumbnails win YouTube because exaggerated wide-eye expressions trigger face-first scanning: MIT research found the brain processes facial cues in about 100 milliseconds, roughly 60,000 times faster than text. ๐ is the thumbnail logic compressed into a single character.
- โขLinguist Gretchen McCulloch describes emoji and stream emotes as "second-order" communication, used for social bonding rather than literal meaning. ๐ is the clearest example: it says almost nothing on its own, but deploying it signals you're paying attention to the same thing as someone else.
- โขThe slang phrase "caught in 4k", where ๐ is the de facto sidekick emoji, didn't start with cameras. It came from a 2019 RDCWorld1 comedy sketch about a lawyer asking how his client got filmed committing crimes at such high resolution.
- โขThe Unicode paperwork that got ๐ into the standard is L2/09-026, co-authored in January 2009 by Markus Scherer, Mark Davis, Kat Momoi, and Darick Tong at Google plus Yasuo Kida and Peter Edberg at Apple. That single proposal covered 674 glyphs from Japan's carrier sets, including nearly every face emoji you still use today.
- โขScreen readers speak the Unicode name. On iOS, VoiceOver reads ๐ as "eyes". On Android, TalkBack can misfire on emoji in apps like WhatsApp and Discord, which is why the Perkins School for the Blind advises sighted users to push emoji to the end of a message so blind readers aren't forced to hear "eyes eyes eyes" mid-sentence.
- โขThe "side-eye" gesture got its first academic write-up in 1976, almost half a century before bombastic-side-eye TikTok. Linguists John and Angela Rickford published "Cut-Eye and Suck-Teeth: African Words and Gestures in New World Guise" in the Journal of American Folklore (89:353), tracing the diagonal-glare gesture across West African, Caribbean, and US Black communities and back to pre-colonial roots. The emoji that TikTok rebranded in 2023 was already a documented diaspora gesture in 1976.
- โขThe ๐๏ธโ๐จ๏ธ Eye in Speech Bubble emoji wasn't designed by Unicode, it was designed by Hanna Wittmark and Patrick Knowlton at Goodby, Silverstein & Partners for the Ad Council's October 2015 "I Am A Witness" anti-bullying campaign. It launched as a Twitter custom emoji via #IAmAWitness and was fast-tracked into Unicode 9.0 the following year. In its first six weeks the campaign racked up 600M+ online impressions, 10M video views, and 57,000 emoji uses on Kik per NPR.
In pop culture
- โขNBA trade deadlines have become synonymous with the ๐ emoji. When Isaiah Thomas tweeted just ๐ during the February 2017 deadline, it set the template for how athletes signal insider knowledge on social media.
- โขThe "bombastic side eye" TikTok sound by @cynthiammasi (January 2023) became one of the platform's most-used audios, with 9.6 million plays and 205,000+ videos. ๐ was the default caption emoji.
- โขThe "Let's Take a Look ๐" meme format peaked in October 2025 across X, TikTok, and Instagram. Animals, cartoon characters, and video game characters all got the ๐ sticker treatment.
- โขIn June 2020, the ๐๐๐ campaign hijacked tech Twitter's hype culture. Users changed display names to ๐๐๐, creating fake startup buzz that turned out to be a racial justice fundraiser raising over $200,000.
Trivia
For developers
- โข๐ is . Unicode name: EYES. Common shortcodes: (Slack, Discord, GitHub). Fully supported across all modern platforms.
- โขBefore Google's 2017 redesign, Android rendered ๐ as a single eye. If you're building cross-platform apps that display emoji history or changelogs, account for this legacy rendering.
- โขOn GitHub, ๐ is one of the built-in issue/PR reactions. Some teams have requested auto-follow behavior when reacting with ๐, but it isn't built in yet.
See the full Emoji Developer Tools guide for regex patterns, encoding helpers, and more.
What does ๐ mean to you?
Select all that apply
- Eyes Emoji (emojipedia.org)
- Eyes Emoji Meaning (dictionary.com)
- The Most Popular Emojis Used in Social Posts in 2025 (buffer.com)
- Bombastic Side Eye / Side Eye TikTok Trend (knowyourmeme.com)
- Let's Take a Look ๐ / Noticing ๐ (knowyourmeme.com)
- NBA Trade Deadline Eyeball Emojis (thecomeback.com)
- How Different Cultures Perceive Emojis (daytranslations.com)
- Redesigning Android Emoji (medium.com)
- Exploring the Most Popular Slack Emojis (haekka.com)
- Eye Mouth Eye Emoji ๐๐๐ (knowyourmeme.com)
- It Is What It Is: Behind the Eye Mouth Eye Emoji (fortune.com)
- GitHub Community Discussion: ๐ Auto-Follow (github.com)
- Gen Z's Guide to Emoji Meanings for Millennials (virola.io)
- Unicode Emoji Frequency (unicode.org)
- L2/09-026 Emoji Symbols Proposed for New Encoding (PDF) (unicode.org)
- Face with Peeking Eye (Emojipedia) (emojipedia.org)
- How do people with vision impairments use emoji? (Perkins) (perkins.org)
- TalkBack Android Screen Reader (Guide Dogs UK) (guidedogs.org.uk)
- Cut-Eye and Suck-Teeth: African Words and Gestures in New World Guise (Rickford & Rickford 1976, PDF) (johnrickford.com)
- Ad Council debuts Twitter custom emoji for I Am A Witness bullying-prevention campaign (prnewswire.com)
- Fighting Online Bullying One Emoji At A Time (NPR) (npr.org)
- Eye in Speech Bubble (Emojipedia) (emojipedia.org)
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