Face Vomiting Emoji

A yellow face with scrunched, X-shaped eyes spewing a bright-green stream of vomit. This is the emoji you reach for when 🤢 (nauseated face) isn't strong enough. Where 🤢 is still holding it in, 🤮 has given up entirely.

Emojipedia describes it as representing "physical illness or disgust, more intensely" than its green-faced sibling. Dictionary.com adds that people use it to "dramatically characterize something as disgusting," which covers everything from bad behavior to lovey-dovey displays of affection to a meal that didn't survive reheating.

The split between literal and figurative usage is roughly even. People use 🤮 for actual sickness (food poisoning, hangovers, morning sickness, the flu) and for emotional disgust (cringe content, terrible opinions, things that give them "the ick"). The emoji doesn't distinguish between the two, and that ambiguity is part of its usefulness. "That take is 🤮" and "I have food poisoning 🤮" are equally valid.

Ranked 22nd among all emoji and 16th within the smileys & emotion category. For an emoji that depicts active vomiting, that's a remarkably high placement. It tells you something about how much of digital communication is people expressing disgust at things.

On social media, 🤮 does double duty. It's the literal sickness emoji and the figurative disgust emoji, and context is the only thing separating them.

Literal use: Morning sickness updates, hangover chronicles, food poisoning play-by-plays. The combo 🤰🤮 is so common for first-trimester nausea that it's practically its own shorthand. "Day 47 of morning sickness 🤮" needs no further explanation.

Figurative use: This is the larger bucket. Cringe content gets 🤮. Bad takes get 🤮. Couples being too publicly affectionate get 🤮 from their single friends. Political opinions you disagree with get 🤮. The emoji has become a one-character review: if something makes you 🤮, everyone understands what you mean without further elaboration.

The ick reaction: Gen Z has adopted 🤮 as the official "ick" emoji. When someone describes a dating dealbreaker ("he chews with his mouth open" / "she said she doesn't like dogs"), the response is 🤮. It's not that the behavior is literally nauseating. It's that 🤮 captures the visceral, involuntary recoil of encountering something that kills attraction.

Notably, 🤮 is one of the few expressive emojis that's almost never used positively. Unlike 😱 (which works for excited shock) or 💀 (which means laughing), 🤮 is always negative. Whether it's literal illness or metaphorical disgust, nobody sends 🤮 as a compliment.

🤮 is almost never flirty. In rare cases, it can be part of playful roasting ("your taste in movies 🤮") which functions as banter in early dating. But the emoji is overwhelmingly used to express genuine or exaggerated disgust. If you're trying to flirt, pick literally any other emoji.

• •Playful if: they're roasting your preferences (music, food, movies) with a teasing tone
• •Hostile if: they're reacting to you as a person or your appearance
• •Literal if: they're describing physical sickness or a gross situation
• •Group solidarity if: you're both reacting to the same cringe content

Before 🤮 existed, emoji users who wanted to express vomiting had to settle for 🤢 (nauseated face), which only shows someone feeling sick but not actually being sick. It's the difference between the warning and the event.

🤮 arrived in Unicode 10.0 (2017) as one of the most anticipated additions to Emoji 5.0. The emoji filled what users saw as a critical gap: you could express happiness in twelve different ways, but you couldn't express actually throwing up.

The comic xkcd #1813 ("Vomiting Emoji") captured the cultural moment perfectly. Published in March 2017, just months before the emoji's release, it showed a character arguing that "vomiting" should be a combining modifier rather than a standalone face — so you could make any emoji vomit. The idea was funny enough that someone actually built it, creating vomiting versions of hundreds of emoji. Unicode didn't adopt the modifier approach, but the joke highlighted how badly people wanted this emoji.

Every major platform renders 🤮 with the same core elements: scrunched or X-shaped eyes, open mouth, and a bright green stream. The green color is universal, despite real vomit being... not usually that color. The design choice prioritizes readability at small sizes over anatomical accuracy, which is probably for the best.

Approved in Unicode 10.0 (June 2017) as U+1F92EU+1F92E FACE WITH OPEN MOUTH VOMITING. Added to Emoji 5.0 in 2017 alongside other highly requested faces like 🤯 (exploding head), 🧐 (monocle face), and 🥺 (pleading face).

The emoji was part of a batch designed to fill emotional gaps in the existing set. Before 2017, 🤢 (nauseated face) existed but only showed someone about to vomit. Users wanted the full follow-through. The vomiting face filled that gap with unmistakable clarity: scrunched eyes, open mouth, green stream. No ambiguity about what's happening.

The original Unicode name — "Face with Open Mouth Vomiting" — is characteristically technical. Most platforms shortened it to "Face Vomiting" in their implementations.

1. 2016Unicode proposal L2/16-313 submitted, requesting a vomiting face to complement the newly approved 🤢↗
2. 2016🤢 Nauseated Face debuts in Unicode 9.0 — users immediately ask for the follow-through↗
3. 2017xkcd #1813 proposes making 'vomiting' a combining modifier for any emoji↗
4. 2017Unicode 10.0 approves 🤮 as U+1F92E Face with Open Mouth Vomiting in Emoji 5.0↗
5. 2020Pandemic drives spike in sickness emoji usage; 🤮 and 🤢 both surge on Google Trends
6. 2022TikTok's 'ick' trend adopts 🤮 as its signature emoji, expanding figurative usage

🤮 translates universally better than most emoji because vomiting is one of those rare human experiences that needs no cultural context. Everyone everywhere understands what the green stream means.

That said, the figurative uses vary by region. In Western internet culture, 🤮 as a disgust reaction to cringe content, bad opinions, and PDA is standard. The "ick" usage — rating dating dealbreakers — is predominantly an English-language phenomenon that spread through TikTok and Twitter.

In East Asian digital culture, disgust in text is more often expressed through kaomoji like (´;ω;(´;ω;) or or ('A')` (which emphasize distress over vomiting specifically). The direct green-stream visual of 🤮 can feel more aggressive in cultures that prefer indirect expression of negative emotions.

One universal: 🤮 sent directly at someone's content is hostile in every culture. There's no version of "you make me want to vomit" that reads as friendly, regardless of the language around it.

• •🤮 ranks 22nd among all emoji — higher than most positive emojis. An emoji depicting active vomiting is more popular than hundreds of smiling, waving, and celebrating options. Turns out people need to express disgust more than joy.
• •The xkcd comic #1813 proposed making "vomiting" a combining modifier so any emoji could vomit. Someone actually built it as a project, generating vomiting versions of every emoji. The 🏠 house vomiting is particularly cursed.
• •🤮 was approved alongside 🤯 (exploding head) and 🧐 (monocle face) in Unicode 10.0 (2017). The three represent dramatically different energy levels: intellectual curiosity, mind-blown shock, and violent illness.
• •The combo 🤰🤮 has become shorthand for first-trimester morning sickness across every social platform. Two emojis communicate what would otherwise require a paragraph about pregnancy nausea.
• •Google's Emoji Kitchen feature lets you merge 🤮 with other emoji on Gboard to create hybrid sticker mashups. There are over 20,000 possible combinations across all emoji.
• •People Google "🤢 meaning" more often than "🤮 meaning" despite 🤮 being more popular overall. Why? Because 🤮 is self-explanatory — nobody needs a dictionary for a face actively ejecting green liquid. 🤢 is the ambiguous one.
• •During COVID's peak in 2020, 🤢 nearly caught 🤮 in Google Trends search volume, closing a 25-point gap to just 3 points. Once the pandemic eased, 🤮 pulled back ahead. Sickness emoji ride waves; disgust emoji are evergreen.

• •Sending 🤮 directed at someone's work, appearance, or effort reads as hostile regardless of your intent. Even if you mean it as a joke, the recipient sees "you make me want to vomit." This is one emoji where playful intent doesn't translate well in text.
• •In workplace communication, 🤮 is almost never appropriate. A boss once made headlines for reacting to an employee's work with a puke emoji, which read as cruel rather than casual. Stick to words in professional settings.
• •The line between 🤢 and 🤮 matters. 🤢 says "this makes me uncomfortable." 🤮 says "this makes me physically ill." Using 🤮 for mild displeasure is like using a foghorn to knock on a door.

• •The xkcd #1813 comic ("Vomiting Emoji") published in March 2017 proposed that "vomiting" should be a Unicode combining modifier. The comic went viral in tech circles and was published just months before 🤮's official release in Unicode 10.0.
• •The film *Team America: World Police* (2004) features an extended puppet-vomiting scene that became a cult meme. The excessive, absurd volume of the vomit matches the energy of stacking 🤮🤮🤮 for emphasis.
• •Google's Emoji Kitchen feature lets users combine 🤮 with other emoji to create hybrid stickers. The 🤮 + 🥰 mashup (love-vomit) and 🤮 + 🎃 (jack-o-lantern vomiting) are fan favorites.

• •Codepoint: U+1F92EU+1F92E. Part of the Supplemental Symbols and Pictographs block (U+1F900U+1F900-U+1F9FFU+1F9FF).
• •Shortcodes: :face_vomiting::face_vomiting: on Slack and GitHub, :face_with_open_mouth_vomiting::face_with_open_mouth_vomiting: is the longer variant.
• •Does not support skin tone modifiers.
• •In sentiment analysis, 🤮 is reliably negative. Unlike many face emoji with ambiguous sentiment, 🤮 is consistently disgust or illness. Weight it as strongly negative.
• •Emoji Kitchen (Gboard) supports 🤮 in mashup stickers. If building emoji-related features, note that 🤮 is one of the most combined faces.

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