Face With Peeking Eye Emoji

A yellow face with both hands covering its eyes, but one eye peeking through spread fingers. The face of someone who can't look but can't look away. Emojipedia describes it as conveying "a mix of emotions such as shyness, embarrassment, or intrigue" and being "perfect for moments when you want to hide but can't resist a curious glance."

The emoji was originally called "Can't Look Away Face" in its Unicode proposal, which is a better description of what it captures. It was proposed by three linguists: Gretchen McCulloch (author of "Because Internet: Understanding the New Rules of Language"), Lauren Gawne (her Lingthusiasm podcast cohost), and Jennifer Daniel (Google's emoji lead, Unicode Subcommittee chair). Their proposal argued that "humans are inherently curious animals" who "want to know what's happening, even when we know we shouldn't be looking." The emoji captures that specific tension between the impulse to look away and the inability to actually do it.

The gesture itself is deeply human. Everyone has covered their eyes during a horror movie only to peek through their fingers. Everyone has scrolled past something cringeworthy and then scrolled back to look again. The covering-eyes-but-peeking move is so universal that the proposers (all linguists who study gesture and communication) identified it as a gap in the emoji vocabulary that needed filling.

🫣 fills the space between curiosity and discomfort. On TikTok, it's the top comment under content that's embarrassing, scandalous, or uncomfortably relatable: "Not the ex's name in the title 🫣" or "She really just said that on camera 🫣." On Instagram, it appears under gossip posts, cringeworthy confessions, and anything where the poster is sharing something they're slightly nervous about. In DMs, it signals "I'm watching this situation unfold and I'm not sure how I feel about it."

The emoji also works for shy excitement. "He's looking this way 🫣" is nervous anticipation, not discomfort. "Just posted my first video 🫣" is vulnerability mixed with hope. The peeking eye adds a quality of tentative engagement that straight-up covering-eyes emojis (🙈) don't have. 🙈 hides completely. 🫣 hides but watches.

At work, 🫣 is usable but niche. "Just sent the email to the wrong client 🫣" captures the horror perfectly. But in most professional contexts, 😬 or 😅 are more standard ways to express workplace cringe.

🫣 was born from linguistics.

Gretchen McCulloch, the Canadian internet linguist whose book "Because Internet" became the definitive text on how the internet changed language, proposed the emoji alongside her Lingthusiasm podcast cohost Lauren Gawne and Jennifer Daniel (Google's emoji lead). The three linguists submitted L2/19-378 in July 2019 under the working title "Can't Look Away Face."

Their proposal made a simple but powerful argument: "humans are inherently curious animals" who "want to know what's happening, even when we know we shouldn't be looking." The covering-eyes-but-peeking gesture is universal across cultures. Horror movies, cringeworthy moments, rubbernecking at accidents, scrolling past something you know you should ignore: the impulse to look away and the inability to actually do it is a fundamental human experience. No emoji captured it.

The connection between emoji and gesture was central to the proposal. During the writing of "Because Internet," Lauren Gawne offered a breakthrough insight: "You realize this is all related to gesture, right?" This realization, that emoji function as digital gestures rather than just tiny pictures, informed how the team identified gaps in the emoji vocabulary. The peeking-eye face isn't a picture of a person covering their eyes. It's a gesture: the thing you do with your hands when you can't look but can't stop looking.

Unicode approved it in Unicode 14.0 (2021), renaming it from "Can't Look Away Face" to "Face with Peeking Eye." The original name was arguably better at capturing the emotional state, but the official name describes the visual more precisely.

Approved in Unicode 14.0 (2021) as U+1FAE3U+1FAE3 FACE WITH PEEKING EYE. Originally proposed as "Can't Look Away Face" in L2/19-378, submitted July 2019, updated December 2019. Proposed by Gretchen McCulloch (internet linguist, author of "Because Internet"), Lauren Gawne (linguist, Lingthusiasm cohost), and Jennifer Daniel (Google emoji lead, Unicode Subcommittee chair). Part of the same Unicode 14.0 batch as 🫠, 🥹, 🫶, and 🫡.

1. 2019Gretchen McCulloch, Lauren Gawne, and Jennifer Daniel submit proposal L2/19-378 as "Can't Look Away Face" (July, updated December)↗
2. 2019Gretchen McCulloch publishes "Because Internet: Understanding the New Rules of Language"
3. 2021Unicode 14.0 approves 🫣 as U+1FAE3 FACE WITH PEEKING EYE, renamed from the original proposal title↗
4. 2022Available on iOS 15.4 and Android 12L. Quickly adopted for gossip, cringe, and shy reactions

• •The original proposal title was "Can't Look Away Face", which better describes the emotional state than the official Unicode name "Face with Peeking Eye." The rename prioritized visual accuracy over emotional accuracy.
• •Three linguists proposed it: Gretchen McCulloch (internet linguist, author of "Because Internet"), Lauren Gawne (her Lingthusiasm podcast cohost), and Jennifer Daniel (Google's emoji lead). Their proposal argued that the inability to look away from something you know you should ignore is a universal human experience.
• •During the writing of "Because Internet," Lauren Gawne told McCulloch: "You realize this is all related to gesture, right?" This insight, that emoji are digital gestures, informed how the team identified missing expressions in the emoji vocabulary.
• •The covering-eyes-but-peeking gesture is so universal that it appears across all studied cultures. Horror movie audiences, drivers passing accidents, and people scrolling past content they should ignore all do the exact same thing. No emoji captured it until 🫣.
• •🫣 became the unofficial emoji of doomscrolling. The gesture of covering your eyes but peeking through your fingers maps perfectly onto the experience of scrolling through distressing news you know you should stop reading but can't.
• •The proposal was written by the author of *Because Internet*, the most widely-read book about internet linguistics. McCulloch literally wrote the book on how language works online, then used that expertise to design an emoji.
• •Gretchen McCulloch described the pitch as filling a gap in "interpersonal meta-commentary", her phrase for the tiny sidebar reactions we send about a situation rather than about the topic of conversation. 🫣 is a whole meta-comment in one character: "I'm commenting on the fact that we're witnessing this."
• •The gesture works because it's the same muscle pattern used in horror cinemas, driving past a crash, and reading a bad text message. Traffic psychologists consider rubbernecking so unavoidable that UK and US highway agencies deploy visual screens at crash sites. 🫣 captures rubbernecking in a single face.
• •Per emojiterra's usage ranking, 🫣 sits at #289 out of 1,950 emojis, and #100 of 168 in the Smileys & Emotion category. The ranking is in slow decline from its 2022 launch peak, which is normal for every new emoji: novelty spikes, then settles.
• •The 👉👈 nervous-fingers combo was the dominant shy-Gen-Z emoji through 2020. When 🫣 launched in 2022, it took over some of the same work but kept its own lane: 👉👈 is soft vulnerability with no visual threat, 🫣 is vulnerability in a moment of watching something you can't unsee.
• •Screen readers announce 🫣 as "face with peeking eye" mid-sentence, which accessibility advocates flag as disruptive when used more than once per message. The original proposal name "Can't Look Away Face" would have been even longer and more awkward to hear read aloud.

• •Some people use 🫣 as general embarrassment, not realizing the specific "can't look away" quality that distinguishes it from 🙈. If you're just embarrassed, 😬 or 🙈 might be more accurate.
• •The peeking element can read as voyeuristic in the wrong context. Sending 🫣 when someone shares private information can feel like you're treating their vulnerability as entertainment.
• •In some contexts, 🫣 gets confused with 🤭 (hand over mouth). The hands are covering different parts of the face: eyes (can't look) vs mouth (can't believe what was just said). Different gesture, different meaning.

• •🫣 (Face with Peeking Eye) captures the "can't look but can't look away" feeling. Horror fans adopted it for jump scares and tense scenes.
• •The one-eye-peeking gesture maps to the universal way people watch scary movies through their fingers. No emoji captured this specific action before Unicode 14.0.