Green Salad Emoji

🥗 is a white bowl of mixed greens with tomato and other vegetables, and on most platforms it's the shorthand for "I am eating healthy, please notice." It covers actual salad posts, diet talk, vegetarian and vegan content, meal prep, and the broader wellness aesthetic that runs through Instagram and TikTok. Emojipedia describes it as an undressed garden salad with leafy greens, tomato, and other bits like red onion or black olives.

The emoji has two tones that coexist. One is sincere: gym people, dietitians, meal-prep accounts, and restaurants use 🥗 exactly as advertised. The other is self-deprecating: paired with 😩, 🍕, or 🫠, it becomes a running joke about eating salad when the body wants anything else. That second tone is arguably more common in text threads than on feed posts, because nobody captions a selfie with 🥗😩.

It was approved in Unicode 9.0 (2016) alongside 71 other characters including 🥑, 🥒, and 🥬, which is why it reads as part of a wider "produce class of 2016" rather than a standalone symbol.

On Instagram, 🥗 sits in the same caption pocket as ✨ and 🌱, tagging wellness, #cleaneating, and plant-based food content. Sweetgreen and Chopt both use it to punctuate menu drops and seasonal bowls, and Sweetgreen has roughly 3.5x the Instagram follower count of Chopt in New York, which tells you which brand owns the emoji in the category.

On TikTok, 🥗 rides the "that girl" and clean-girl aesthetic current, where a morning routine includes pilates, super greens, and a colorful lunch bowl. It also pops up in TikTok recipe trends like the Green Goddess salad and the raw carrot salad that went viral on hormone-health FoodTok.

In text threads 🥗 skews sarcastic. The Women Laughing Alone With Salad meme lives rent-free in the emoji's subtext. Post it after "ate one salad, checking for abs" and the joke lands without extra words.

The word "salad" comes from the Vulgar Latin *salata*, short for *herba salata*, meaning "salted herb." Ancient Romans ate raw greens dressed in oil, vinegar, and salt, and the salt part is where the name stuck. The Latin root is sal, which also gives us salary (Roman soldiers were reportedly paid in salt allowances) and sauce.

The dish as we know it, mixed leaves with a proper dressing in a bowl, is a Renaissance Italian invention. Cooked food dominated medieval European tables, and raw vegetables only crept back in through Italian and French kitchens in the 15th and 16th centuries. By the time the emoji arrived in 2016, salad had done a full lap: ancient Roman staple, medieval afterthought, Renaissance rediscovery, 20th-century side dish, 21st-century "main."

The emoji itself came through a November 2015 food emoji proposal that added a pile of kitchen staples to Unicode 9.0, including paella, doner kebab, avocado, and green salad. The argument was basic representation: there were plenty of desserts and fast foods in the emoji set, and almost no plain vegetables.

1. 2016Approved in Unicode 9.0 (June 21, 2016). Google's Android 7.1 Nougat and Apple's iOS 10.2 were among the first to ship a design. Most vendors included a hard-boiled egg on top.↗
2. 2018Google removes the egg from the salad in Android P beta 2. Jennifer Daniel, then Google's emoji UX manager, announces it on Twitter as a move to make the salad "more inclusive" of vegans. The internet argues for a week.↗
3. 2018British egg producers object publicly. The [Countryside Alliance](https://www.theregister.com/2018/06/08/google_salad_emoji/) calls it "utterly ridiculous." Daniel later clarifies the change was really about matching Unicode's official description: "a bowl of healthy salad, containing lettuce, tomato, and other salad items such as cucumber."
4. 2020Apple redesigns the salad for iOS 14 with a slightly more upright camera angle, more visible greens, and a fresher bowl. The egg stays gone across most vendors by this point.
5. 2025🥗 is a regular in TikTok's "that girl" and clean-girl aesthetic content. The emoji gets more wellness-account traction than at any point since launch.

• •The word "salad" comes from the Latin *sal* meaning salt. Ancient Romans ate their greens dressed in salt, oil, and vinegar, which is where the name stuck.
• •Google's salad emoji used to have a hard-boiled egg on top. It was removed in 2018 to make the image more faithful to Unicode's official description, which lists lettuce, tomato, and cucumber but no egg.
• •The Countryside Alliance, a UK egg-farming advocacy group, publicly called Google's 2018 egg removal "utterly ridiculous." It is probably the only time in history that egg producers weighed in on emoji design.
• •The Women Laughing Alone With Salad stock-photo meme predates the emoji by years. When 🥗 shipped in 2016, it basically inherited the meme's sarcasm as free cultural baggage.
• •🥗 arrived in Unicode 9.0 as part of a 2015 food-emoji push that also added 🥑, 🥒, 🥬, and 🥕. The salad emoji is effectively a plated version of the rest of that release.
• •Word "salary" shares a root with "salad." Both come from sal (salt), because Roman soldiers were partially paid in salt allowances. Your paycheck is etymologically the same thing as your lunch.
• •The Italian insalata mista is dressed at the table by the eater, not the kitchen. What Americans call "Italian dressing" does not exist in Italy.
• •The Green Goddess salad TikTok trend from 2022 was reportedly the single biggest engagement driver for 🥗 in the emoji's history, outperforming even the 2018 Google-egg news cycle.

• •Women Laughing Alone With Salad: stock-photo meme from the early 2010s about women pretending to enjoy salad. Predates the emoji but shaped its entire sarcastic subtext.
• •Sweetgreen x Renée Rapp: 2023 signature-salad collab that used 🥗 as the campaign's visual hook across Instagram.
• •Google's 2018 salad-egg removal was covered by Euronews, Fox News, The Register, and Today. The story ran for a week.