Face Blowing A Kiss Emoji

A winking face with puckered lips blowing a small red heart. It's the flirtiest mainstream emoji, sitting right at the intersection of romantic affection and playful warmth. Adobe's 2019 Emoji Trend Report ranked it the #3 most popular emoji in the US, behind only 😂 and ❤️. Google's Gboard data showed it beating 😍 in global usage, which surprised a lot of people. The reason: 😘 is versatile enough to work between partners, crushes, close friends, and family, while 😍 leans heavily romantic. That versatility is also what makes it confusing. When someone you barely know sends 😘, you have to figure out if it's flirting, friendliness, or just their texting style.

Extremely common in DMs, goodnight texts, and as a sign-off between people who are close. On dating apps, it's used more cautiously than you'd expect. Emojipedia's dating app research shows that overtly romantic emojis can be polarizing early in conversations. In family group chats, moms and aunts use 😘 freely. Between friends, it depends on the friend group's culture, some send kisses constantly, others would find it weird. At work, it's the least accepted emoji with only 22.1% of people finding it appropriate professionally.

😘 is one of the few emojis that leans flirty by default. Unlike 😂 or 😭 where context determines meaning, 😘 carries romantic connotation even when used casually. The wink plus the heart floating out is hard to read as purely platonic. That said, many people (especially older generations and certain friend groups) use it as a warm sign-off without romantic intent.

• •😘 after a compliment about your appearance? Flirty.
• •😘 as a goodnight text from someone you've been talking to? Flirty.
• •😘 from your mom or aunt? Obviously not flirty.
• •😘 from a friend who sends it to everyone? Probably just their style, not directed at you specifically.
• •😘 from someone who usually sends 👍 or 😊 but suddenly switches to 😘? Pay attention, something changed.

The emoji was part of the Unicode 6.0 batch in 2010, derived from Japanese carrier emoji sets where kissing faces were already popular. The proposal was filed as L2/09-026 (January 2009) by Markus Scherer, Mark Davis, Kat Momoi, and Darick Tong of Google plus Yasuo Kida and Peter Edberg of Apple, the same six-author team that batched 674 glyphs in one go and the founding document for almost every Unicode 6.0 face emoji. The original Unicode name was "Face Throwing a Kiss," which was later softened to "Face Blowing a Kiss." The gesture of blowing a kiss is centuries old in Western culture, typically associated with expressing affection from a distance. The emoji's design, a winking face with puckered lips and a small red heart floating away, captures this perfectly. SoftBank's 2000 carrier design was one of the earliest versions, predating Unicode by a full decade. Microsoft notably used a feminized design with long eyelashes and red lipstick for years before converging with other vendors on the gender-neutral yellow face.

Approved in Unicode 6.0 (2010) as U+1F618U+1F618 FACE THROWING A KISS. The official name was later updated to Face Blowing a Kiss. Part of the Emoticons block. Added to Emoji 1.0 in 2015.

• 🕊️
  Latin: ad ōrāre = 'to mouth toward': [Etymonline traces 'adoration'](https://www.etymonline.com/word/adoration) to Latin adōrātiō, from ad + ōrāre ('speak formally, pray'). The literal Roman performance of adōrātiō, [per the Wikipedia article on Adoration](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Adoration), was to raise the hand to the mouth, kiss it, then wave it toward the deity. The blown kiss is the gesture that gave us the word for worship.
• 🏛️
  Pliny and the temple kiss: Roman writers including Pliny the Elder noted that worshippers entering a temple would [kiss their fingers and touch them to the statue or shrine](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Adoration). When the statue was out of reach, they kissed the hand and threw the kiss toward the god. Centuries before Petrarch wrote love poetry, Romans had already standardized the gesture 😘 inherits.
• 💫
  Greek proskynesis: The Greek parallel was [proskynesis](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Proskynesis), prostration plus a kiss blown toward an icon or ruler. Alexander the Great famously demanded it as a sign of submission, which Greek companions resented because they considered the gesture proper only for gods. The same blown-kiss-as-deference signal that 😘 now uses for warmth originally indicated ritual subordination.
• ⛪
  Christian inheritance: Cardinal Ratzinger explicitly described prayer as 'ad oratio, mouth to mouth, in other words, a kiss.' [Catholic devotional writing](https://aleteia.org/2022/12/04/prayer-is-a-kiss-what-we-learn-from-the-latin-roots-of-adore/) still frames adoration as a kiss directed at God. The genuflect-and-kiss-the-air gesture in front of a host or icon is the surviving liturgical version of what Romans did for their deities.
• 📱
  Why this matters for the emoji: The blown-kiss visual is one of the oldest persistently-recognized human gestures, with a continuous cultural inheritance from temple ritual through medieval courtly love into modern goodbye-text scripting. That 2,000-year backstory is why 😘 reads as warm-and-respectful in cultures that mostly disagree about everything else: it predates the disagreements.

1. 2000SoftBank includes a kissing face in its proprietary emoji set↗
2. 2010Unicode 6.0 standardizes it as U+1F618 FACE THROWING A KISS↗
3. 2015Added to Emoji 1.0. Apple, Google, and others ship their designs
4. 2017Google drops blob design, switches to round face with floating heart
5. 2018Microsoft removes the feminine eyelashes and lipstick from their design, aligning with other vendors

In Latin America and Southern Europe, blowing kisses (physical and digital) is casual and common. Friends, family, and acquaintances use 😘 freely. In Japan and East Asia, the gesture is more reserved and carries stronger romantic implications. Sending 😘 to someone in Japan who isn't your partner would be unusual. In the US and UK, it sits somewhere in the middle: common between close friends and romantic partners, but less casual than in Latin cultures.

• •Adobe's 2019 study of 1,000 US emoji users ranked 😘 as the #3 most popular emoji, behind 😂 and ❤️.
• •On Google's Gboard keyboard, 😘 outranks 😍 as the most-used love emoji worldwide.
• •The original Unicode name was "Face Throwing a Kiss," as if the emoji was hurling the kiss like a projectile. It was later softened to "Face Blowing a Kiss."
• •A University of Michigan study in 2016 confirmed 😘 as one of the most consistently popular emojis across all demographics.
• •Microsoft's pre-2018 design was the only vendor to give the emoji feminine features (eyelashes, lipstick). All other vendors used a gender-neutral yellow face from the start.
• •Pepsi's 2016 #PepsiMoji campaign put over 600 emoji designs on more than a billion bottles across 100+ markets. The "Kissy Face" (based on 😘) was one of the hero designs, alongside sunglasses and smirk faces.
• •The tiny ❤️ floating from 😘's mouth is the only detached element on any standard smiley emoji. Every other face emoji is self-contained. That floating heart makes 😘 technically a two-part composition rendered as a single character.
• •Kissing itself may be 21 million years old. A November 2025 Oxford study published in Evolution and Human Behavior mapped non-aggressive mouth-to-mouth contact across chimpanzees, bonobos, orangutans and several monkey species, concluding that kissing evolved in the common ancestor of the great apes around 21.5 to 16.9 million years ago. Dr Matilda Brindle's team also concluded Neanderthals likely kissed, consistent with evidence of oral-microbe exchange between humans and Neanderthals. 😘 captures a gesture older than our species by about twenty million years.
• •😘 has the flattest seasonal search pattern of any mainstream romantic emoji. Our April 2026 monthly aggregation of Google Trends 2020 to 2026 shows 😘 ranging from 34.9 (February, low) to 42.5 (December, high), a spread of just 7.6 points across the entire calendar. Valentine's Day doesn't spike it. International Kissing Day (July 6) barely registers. The kiss face is so saturated in everyday goodnight-texting that holidays can't move the needle.
• •The "face" kiss emojis 😗, 😙, 😚 are effectively dead as search terms. Our April 2026 Trends pull shows all three flatlining between 2 and 8 for six years straight. 😚 barely beats the other two. 😘 and 💋 are the only members of the kiss family with any real search pulse.
• •Hollywood's 1934 Hays Code is responsible for one of the most-repeated screen-kiss myths: that on-screen kisses were limited to three seconds. The Production Code Administration didn't actually enforce a stopwatch; what it banned was 'excessive and lustful kissing.' Alfred Hitchcock famously gamed the rule in Notorious (1946) by directing Cary Grant and Ingrid Bergman to break off every three seconds, then immediately reconnect, stretching what reads as a single kiss across two and a half minutes. The 😘 emoji is, in a sense, the digital descendant of that workaround: a tiny, chaste, code-compliant kiss that you can send as many times as you want.
• •Kiss-greetings between adults vary wildly across Europe by region and country, not just by language. Brilliant Maps and Quartz document the count: most of central France and Paris does two cheek kisses, much of northern France from Normandy to the Belgian border does four, and the Marseille-to-Alps corridor in the southeast does three. Belgium splits internally — Flanders does one, Wallonia leans one or three. Italy does two (left then right). The Netherlands does three. Russia and parts of Eastern Europe do three. The phrase 'a kiss is just a kiss' is provably wrong every time you cross a regional border.
• •Japan historically had no word for kissing. Because mouth-to-mouth contact was considered as intimate as sex and reserved for the bedroom, early European travelers assumed Japanese people didn't kiss. In Japanese social media, 😘 still often reads as surprisingly forward by Western standards. In India, the Indian Penal Code treats public kissing as a punishable offense with up to 3 months imprisonment, which is part of why 😘 in Indian WhatsApp groups carries more weight than in Western ones.

• •The biggest risk: sending 😘 to someone who reads it as romantic when you meant it platonically. This happens constantly between mixed-gender friends and across generational lines.
• •At work, a 😘 meant as "thanks, you're a lifesaver" can land as "I'm flirting with you." It's been cited in workplace harassment discussions as an emoji to avoid.
• •On dating apps, sending 😘 too early can come across as too forward. Most dating experts recommend keeping things light with 😊 or 😏 first.

• •Snapchat uses specific emojis as friend status indicators, and the 😘-adjacent kiss mark 💋 appears in the best friends system. The broader Snapchat emoji system (💛 Besties, ❤️ BFF, 💕 Super BFF, 🔥 Streaks) made emojis into relationship status indicators for an entire generation.
• •😘 is one of the most-Googled emojis for "what does it mean from a guy/girl." SweetyHigh, Cosmopolitan, and BuzzFeed have all published dedicated articles decoding 😘 in dating contexts, generating millions of page views from people trying to figure out if someone is flirting.
• •In K-pop fan culture, 😘 is the standard emoji for "bias" posts (your favorite member). Fan accounts use 😘 in tweet threads dedicated to their bias, and concert fancams are captioned with 😘 directed at the performer.
• •The Boston Globe published a dating advice column specifically about a woman questioning what a guy's 😘 emojis meant. The fact that a major newspaper ran a piece decoding a single emoji tells you everything about how much anxiety 😘 generates compared to friendlier emojis like 😊.
• •The kissing face sits in one of the most dangerous neighborhoods on the emoji keyboard. On many layouts, 😘 is sandwiched between 😗 (neutral kissy face) and 😚 (tender closed-eyes kiss). A wrong tap sends a very different signal. One Quora user sent 😗 to their crush multiple times thinking it meant "waiting" — it didn't.

• •U+1F618U+1F618. No variation selector needed.
• •The floating heart in the design is part of the single codepoint, not a ZWJ sequence. Some older systems render the heart separately or not at all.
• •On Slack, this is :kissing_heart::kissing_heart:. On GitHub it's :kissing_heart::kissing_heart: as well. Discord uses :kissing_heart::kissing_heart:.

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