Hushed Face Emoji

A yellow face with small, open eyes, raised eyebrows, and a small, open mouth. 😯 is the quiet gasp of the emoji world. It doesn't scream surprise like 😲 Astonished Face or drop its jaw like 😮 Face with Open Mouth. Instead, it looks like someone just heard something unexpected and paused for a second. A small "oh."

Approved in Unicode 6.1 (2012) as HUSHED FACE, the name "hushed" is key. This isn't shock. It's the moment right before you decide whether something is shocking. That subtlety is what makes it useful for situations where bigger surprise emojis feel performative.

The design varies more across platforms than most emojis. Google initially interpreted "hushed" as "silenced" and gave it a zipper mouth until Android 6.0.1. Early Microsoft designs showed closed eyes and a flat mouth, missing the surprise entirely. Apple's version has been more consistent, with the round "O" mouth that most people recognize.

Texting. 😯 works when the news is surprising but not life-changing. "They broke up 😯" or "Wait you got the job? 😯" It registers mild disbelief without the theatrics of 😱. Some people use it as a genuine reaction; others deploy it sarcastically to signal "yeah, saw that coming."

Comments and replies. On social media, 😯 is a restrained reaction face. Where 😮 says "OMG" and 😲 says "NO WAY," 😯 says "huh, interesting." It works for plot twists in stories, unexpected announcements, and low-stakes reveals.

Workplace. Safe but bland. "The meeting got moved to 3pm 😯" is fine in Slack. It doesn't carry passive-aggressive energy like 🙂 does. But it's also not a go-to, since most workplace surprises either don't warrant an emoji or need 😮 for emphasis.

The word "hushed" did more damage to this emoji than any design committee could've predicted. When Unicode published the Emoticons block in 2012, they needed names to differentiate a pile of surprised-looking faces. 😮 got "Face with Open Mouth" (clear), 😲 got "Astonished Face" (dramatic), and 😯 got "Hushed Face" -- a word that means both "rendered speechless" and "told to be quiet."

That ambiguity rippled through every platform. Apple read "hushed" as mildly surprised and gave it raised eyebrows with a small "O" mouth. Google read it as silenced and slapped a zipper over its mouth until Android 6.0.1 in late 2015. Microsoft split the difference with closed eyes and a flat mouth -- an expression closer to "resigned" than "surprised." For roughly three years, the same codepoint rendered as three completely unrelated emotions depending on which phone you owned.

The design convergence didn't happen until 2016-2017 when Google dropped the zipper and Microsoft opened the eyes. By then, 😮 had already claimed the "surprise" lane in most people's muscle memory, and 😯 was left playing catch-up. It's arguably the clearest example of how a Unicode name choice can shape -- and limit -- an emoji's entire trajectory.

Approved in Unicode 6.1 (2012) as U+1F62FU+1F62F HUSHED FACE. Added to Emoji 1.0 in 2015. Part of the Emoticons block (U+1F600U+1F600-U+1F64FU+1F64F). The name "hushed" was deliberately chosen to distinguish it from the more expressive 😮 and 😲.

1. 2012Included in Unicode 6.1 as U+1F62F HUSHED FACE
2. 2012Apple launches with raised-brow, small O-mouth design (iOS 6)
3. 2013Google interprets 'hushed' as 'silenced' — ships a zipper-mouth design on Android 4.4↗
4. 2015Standardized in Emoji 1.0; Microsoft design shows closed eyes and flat mouth
5. 2015Android 6.0.1 drops the zipper mouth, redesigns to match Apple's surprise interpretation↗
6. 2017Microsoft updates design to open eyes and small mouth, finally aligning with other platforms
7. 2020All major platforms have converged on a similar raised-brow, small-mouth surprise design

The 😯 vs 😮 confusion isn't just a platform problem -- it's a language problem too. In English, "hushed" pulls double duty between "rendered speechless" and "told to shut up." That ambiguity doesn't exist in every language. Japanese emoji guides tend to file 😯 under surprise without the silencing connotation, partly because the kaomoji tradition already has distinct faces for "shushed" vs "startled."

In East Asian messaging, 😯 gets used more interchangeably with 😮 since both read as polite surprise at small phone sizes. The distinction between the two matters more in Western texting cultures where emoji size is larger in chat bubbles and the mouth-size difference is actually visible.

Across Latin American social media, 😯 often shows up in telenovela-style reactions -- the dramatic pause before gossip drops. It's less about genuine surprise and more about performing the moment of "wait, tell me everything." Meanwhile, in professional contexts globally, 😯 tends to function the same way everywhere: a safe, low-intensity reaction that says "I noticed" without committing to any strong emotion.

• •Google's pre-2016 design of 😯 featured a zipper mouth, interpreting "hushed" as "silenced" rather than "surprised." For three years, texting 😯 to an Android user was like playing emoji roulette -- you meant surprise, they saw a command to shut up.
• •😮 gets roughly 3x the search volume of 😯 on Google Trends, and the gap's been widening since 2021. But here's the weirder stat: when you search by emoji name instead of the character itself, "hushed face emoji" registers as essentially zero. Most people don't even know 😯 has a name.
• •Early Microsoft designs of 😯 showed closed eyes and a flat mouth -- basically the opposite of surprise. Between Apple's mild surprise, Google's zipper, and Microsoft's blank stare, 😯 holds the record for the widest range of platform interpretations of any single emoji in the Emoticons block.
• •The text emoticon :o:o predates 😯 by decades. It appeared in early internet forums in the 1990s as a surprised face. When emoji standardization happened, :o:o didn't map directly to 😯 -- most platforms route it to 😮 instead, which further eroded 😯's already limited market share.
• •😯 and 😮 are so visually similar at small sizes that user testing suggests many people can't tell them apart below 24px. The only reliable distinction is the mouth size, and even that gets lost on low-resolution screens.

• •Before Android 6.0.1, Google users saw a zipper-mouth face when someone sent 😯. The receiver thought they were being told to be quiet, while the sender meant surprise. Platform fragmentation at its worst.
• •Some people read 😯 as embarrassment rather than surprise because of the small open mouth. The "hushed" label adds to the confusion since being hushed can imply being corrected.
• •People occasionally use 😯 when they mean 😮 (bigger surprise). They look similar at small sizes, but 😮 has a significantly larger mouth opening.

• •The Surprised Pikachu meme (September 2018) became the internet's go-to sarcastic surprise reaction. Pikachu's small round mouth mirrors 😯's design almost perfectly. User popokko's original Tumblr post gained 223,000+ notes before the format migrated to Reddit, Twitter, and Instagram. 😯 became the plaintext stand-in for the Pikachu face in text-only contexts.
• •The :o:o emoticon, 😯's spiritual ancestor, was a staple of early-2000s AIM and MSN Messenger conversations. It showed up in away messages and forum posts as the default mild-surprise face years before emoji existed on phones. When emoji keyboards arrived, :o:o got auto-converted to 😮 on most platforms -- not 😯 -- which effectively orphaned the hushed face from its own lineage.
• •Slack and Discord both map the shortcode :hushed::hushed: to 😯, making it one of the more accessible emojis in workplace and gaming chat. But because the shortcode requires knowing the word "hushed" (which most people don't associate with surprise), it rarely gets typed. :open_mouth::open_mouth: and :astonished::astonished: get far more organic usage.

• •😯 is U+1F62FU+1F62F. Common shortcodes: :hushed::hushed: (Slack, Discord, GitHub). UTF-8 encoding: 0xF0 0x9F 0x98 0xAF0xF0 0x9F 0x98 0xAF (4 bytes).
• •Google renamed this emoji internally from "silenced" to "hushed" with Android 6.0.1, triggering a complete design change. If your app shows cached emoji images from pre-2016 Android, users might see the old zipper-mouth version.
• •When building emoji pickers or search, consider that users almost never search for "hushed" -- they'll search "surprise" or "shocked." Tag 😯 with those keywords or it'll never surface. The official Unicode name is a discoverability dead end.

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