Handshake Emoji

Two hands clasped together in a handshake. It means "deal," "agreement," "nice to meet you," or "we're aligned." The handshake is one of the oldest human greeting gestures, dating back to at least the 9th century BC, when an Assyrian relief depicted King Shalmaneser III clasping hands with the Babylonian king to seal an alliance.

The emoji version carries that same formality. 🤝 is more professional than 👍, more definitive than 🤞, and more mutual than 🙏. It implies both parties agree, not just one.

The emoji's biggest technical milestone came in 2021, when Unicode 14.0 introduced 25 skin tone combinations so each hand in the handshake could have a different skin color. Google's emoji creative director Jennifer Daniel had proposed this in 2019, but the technical implementation took years because Unicode's modifier system didn't originally support applying different modifiers to each component of a single emoji.

On LinkedIn, 🤝 is the professional emoji. It appears in connection request messages, deal announcements, partnership posts, and "thrilled to join" career updates. It's one of the few emojis that reads as genuinely appropriate in corporate contexts.

On Twitter/X, 🤝 signals mutual agreement. "Introverts 🤝 extroverts: not wanting to talk on the phone" is a popular meme format where two unlikely groups share a common opinion. The 🤝 in the middle acts as a visual bridge between them.

In texting and group chats, it confirms a plan or a deal. "7pm at the park? 🤝" is a handshake to seal the arrangement.

During and after COVID, 🤝 took on a slight ironic edge. TIME wrote "COVID-19 Killed the Handshake" in 2020. The fist bump 🤜🤛 became the preferred physical greeting. The emoji, however, thrived because digital handshakes carry no germs.

The handshake may be the oldest human greeting gesture. The earliest known depiction is a 9th century BC Assyrian relief showing King Shalmaneser III clasping hands with the Babylonian king Marduk-zakir-shumi I to seal an alliance. Ancient Greek funerary art from the 5th century BC shows the deceased shaking hands with family members, symbolizing the bond between the living and the dead.

The gesture's original purpose was probably to prove you weren't holding a weapon. The up-and-down motion may have been to dislodge knives hidden up sleeves. 17th-century Quakers are credited with popularizing the handshake as a more egalitarian greeting than bowing or tipping hats.

The emoji was approved in Unicode 9.0 (2016). But the real story came in 2021, when Google's Jennifer Daniel proposed multi-skin-tone support. The challenge was technical: Unicode's modifier system applied a single skin tone to an entire emoji. Applying different tones to each hand required a fundamentally new approach. The result was 25 skin tone combinations in Emoji 14.0, making 🤝 one of the most complex emojis in Unicode.

COVID-19 threatened the physical handshake. TIME asked whether COVID would end the handshake. The World Economic Forum questioned its future. Fist bumps, elbow taps, and namaste became alternatives. But the emoji version was unaffected because digital handshakes don't transmit viruses. The pandemic briefly made 🤝 more purely digital than any other gesture emoji.

Approved in Unicode 9.0 (2016) as U+1F91DU+1F91D HANDSHAKE. Added to Emoji 3.0. Part of the People & Body category, hands subcategory. CLDR short name: "handshake." Keywords: agreement, hand, meeting, shake. Skin tone modifiers added in Emoji 14.0 (2021) with 25 combinations.

1. 2015L2/15-054 'Emoji Additions: Tranche 5' by Mark Davis and Peter Edberg batches handshake for Unicode approval↗
2. 2016Approved in Unicode 9.0 as U+1F91D HANDSHAKE with single skin tone support↗
3. 2019Unicode L2/19-265 proposes U+1FAF1 and U+1FAF2 (rightwards/leftwards hand) as building blocks for a multi-skin-tone handshake ZWJ sequence↗
4. 2021Unicode 14.0 adds 25 skin tone combinations for 🤝, making it one of the most complex emojis↗
5. 2022Multi-skin-tone handshake rolls out on iOS 15.4, Android 12L
6. 2025Trump greets Zelenskyy with a handshake on the White House driveway on Feb 28, 2025, before the meeting collapses into a televised shouting match↗

• •The original handshake was batched into Unicode via L2/15-054 'Emoji Additions: Tranche 5' by Mark Davis and Peter Edberg. The multi-skin-tone version needed a separate proposal, L2/19-265, which introduced U+1FAF1 RIGHTWARDS HAND and U+1FAF2 LEFTWARDS HAND as building blocks so each half of the handshake could carry its own skin tone modifier.
• •🤝 is not a single codepoint when skin tones differ. It's a ZWJ sequence of two separate gesture emojis (🫱 + 🫲), each with its own modifier. The simple yellow 🤝 remains U+1F91D, but a brown-hand-shaking-light-hand version is five codepoints long.
• •🤝 supports 25 skin tone combinations since Emoji 14.0 (2021), making it one of the most technically complex emojis in the Unicode standard.
• •The oldest known handshake depiction is a 9th century BC Assyrian relief showing King Shalmaneser III clasping hands with the Babylonian king to seal a military alliance.
• •17th-century Quakers are credited with popularizing the handshake as an egalitarian alternative to bowing. They saw clasping hands as a gesture of equality rather than hierarchy.
• •During COVID, research showed fist bumps transfer 90% fewer germs than handshakes. The digital 🤝 emoji was unaffected because it carries no pathogens.
• •Google's emoji creative director Jennifer Daniel proposed multi-skin-tone handshakes in 2019, but the technical challenge of applying different modifiers to each hand of a single emoji took two years to solve.

• •Using 🤝 in an argument can read as forced reconciliation. If the other person isn't ready to shake on it, the emoji feels presumptuous. Agreement requires both parties.
• •Sending 🤝 to confirm something the other person hasn't actually agreed to. "I'll take the bigger room 🤝" is not a handshake if they didn't say yes.

• •Google published a blog post announcing multi-skin-tone handshake support, explaining how emoji creative director Jennifer Daniel worked to solve the technical challenge of applying different skin tones to each hand. Hypebeast, Engadget, and 9to5Google all covered it as a diversity milestone.
• •TIME's article "COVID-19 Killed the Handshake" and the World Economic Forum's piece both questioned whether the pandemic would end the physical handshake forever. The digital 🤝 emoji was unaffected because it carries no germs.
• •The "X 🤝 Y" meme format became one of Twitter's most recognizable text structures. Two unlikely groups separated by 🤝 finding unexpected common ground (e.g., "Parents 🤝 Teenagers: wanting to leave the party early") generates reliable engagement across the platform.
• •The 9th century BC Assyrian relief depicting two kings shaking hands to seal an alliance is the oldest known depiction of a handshake. HISTORY.com's article on the gesture's origin has been referenced by major publications whenever the future of handshaking is debated.

• •U+1F91DU+1F91D. Supports mixed skin tone modifiers since Emoji 14.0 (25 combinations).
• •On Slack: :handshake::handshake:. On GitHub: :handshake::handshake:. On Discord: :handshake::handshake:.
• •The multi-skin-tone handshake uses a complex encoding: U+1FAF1 U+1F3FB U+200D U+1FAF2 U+1F3FDU+1FAF1 U+1F3FB U+200D U+1FAF2 U+1F3FD (example: light left hand shaking medium right hand). If building emoji parsers, handle these ZWJ sequences before the simpler single-tone version.
• •On older platforms that don't support mixed skin tones, the handshake falls back to the default yellow. Test across platform versions.

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