Ice Cream Emoji

🍨 is scooped ice cream in a bowl, topped with a cherry, a wafer roll, or sprinkles depending on which platform you're looking at. It is basically an ice cream sundae, not a generic ice cream.

In texting, 🍨 usually means a treat, a craving, or a celebration moment. It carries the vibe of going out for dessert rather than the quick summer cone you get from 🍦. When someone posts 🍨, they are often talking about an actual sundae, a birthday, or the hedonistic half of a 'treat yourself' post.

The emoji was approved in Unicode 6.0 in 2010 and has a well-documented gap with its sibling 🍦. Dictionary.com notes that Google and Twitter put the scoops in a bright blue bowl while most other platforms use white or gray, and that the number of scoops and flavors varies by vendor. Apple uses a single brown scoop with two wafer rolls, which reads as chocolate. Google shows strawberry and chocolate scoops with rainbow sprinkles. WhatsApp sticks a cherry on a single scoop. There is no platform consensus on what a bowl of ice cream should look like.

🍨 shows up in three main places on social media. First, dessert content, where it outperforms 🍦 when the photo is a sundae, a parfait, or anything with a topping. Second, birthday and celebration posts, because the cherry-on-top version reads as festive. Third, National Ice Cream Day on the third Sunday of July, when the #NationalIceCreamDay hashtag drives the biggest annual spike.

It also plays a supporting role in the wider dessert emoji vocabulary. Pair 🍨 with 🍫, 🍓, or 🎂 and you are building a dessert post. Pair it with 🏖️☀️ and you are posting from vacation. It leans more 'sit-down treat' than 🍦, which leans 'walking around with a cone.'

🍨 is firmly on the friendly side of the line. Unlike 🍦, which has picked up some mild innuendo in NSFW memes because of its cone-and-swirl shape, the bowl-based 🍨 has almost no suggestive usage. It is birthday-energy, treat-yourself-energy, ice-cream-parlor-energy. If someone wants to flirt with a dessert emoji, they use 🍦, 🍑, or 🍒, not 🍨.

• •🍨 + 🎂 = birthday or celebration treat
• •🍨 + ☕ = dessert after a meal
• •🍨 + ❓ = casual dessert invitation, could be date or friend
• •🍨 alone under a food post = 'your food looks amazing'

The scoops-in-a-bowl design that Unicode enshrined as 🍨 is, essentially, a picture of an ice cream sundae. Two towns argue about who invented the sundae. Two Rivers, Wisconsin claims it in 1881, when George Hallauer asked Edward Berner to pour chocolate syrup (normally reserved for sodas) over a dish of ice cream. Ithaca, New York counter-claims 1892, when Chester Platt's pharmacy printed a 'Cherry Sunday' advertisement in the Ithaca Daily Journal on April 5, which is the oldest written record of the dessert. The weird thing is that both stories involve blue laws. Several sources suggest that pharmacies invented the sundae specifically because local blue laws prevented them from selling ice cream sodas on Sundays, so they dropped the soda and kept the ice cream with syrup. The spelling allegedly shifted from 'Sunday' to 'sundae' to avoid offending religious customers who disliked the sabbath day being used to sell desserts.

The Japanese bowl-of-ice-cream tradition runs parallel. Anmitsu, a Meiji-era dessert of agar jelly, red bean paste, mochi, and fruit, is often served with a scoop of matcha or vanilla ice cream on top. When Shigetaka Kurita designed the original emoji set for NTT DoCoMo in 1999, dessert-in-a-bowl was already iconic in Japanese cafe culture. The emoji that became Unicode 🍨 was standardized as part of the 2010 emoji set, and its bowl-with-toppings design reflects both the Western sundae and the Japanese parfait lineage.

1. 1999Shigetaka Kurita designs a 12x12-pixel dessert emoji for NTT DoCoMo's i-mode↗
2. 2000SoftBank releases its own Japanese-carrier ice cream pictograms alongside DoCoMo's set
3. 2010Unicode 6.0 approves 🍨 at codepoint U+1F368 as 'ICE CREAM'↗
4. 2015Emoji 1.0 ships and 🍨 appears on every major platform
5. 2021Google redesigns 🍨 with more cartoon-style sprinkles and a brighter blue bowl

• •Unicode calls the emoji 'Ice Cream' but the reference image is actually a sundae, which is a disputed 19th-century American invention from either Two Rivers, Wisconsin (1881) or Ithaca, New York (1892).
• •The oldest written record of a sundae is an April 5, 1892 advertisement in the Ithaca Daily Journal for a 'Cherry Sunday.' The spelling later shifted to 'sundae' possibly to avoid offending sabbath-observing customers.
• •Ice cream sundaes may have been invented because of blue laws prohibiting Sunday soda sales. Pharmacies kept the ice cream and syrup, dropped the soda.
• •New Zealand eats more ice cream per capita than any country on earth, at roughly 28.4 liters per person per year. The USA is second at 20.8 liters.
• •President Ronald Reagan declared July National Ice Cream Month in 1984 and named the third Sunday National Ice Cream Day, which is when 🍨 usage peaks every year.
• •Gelato predates modern ice cream and was popularized in 16th-century Florence by Bernardo Buontalenti for the court of Catherine de' Medici. Gelato contains 35% air vs 50% for American ice cream, which is why it tastes denser.
• •Globally, vanilla is the favorite ice cream flavor in 46 countries. Neapolitan (vanilla + chocolate + strawberry) is favorite in 29 countries including the USA, Australia, and Canada.
• •On Apple, 🍨 is a single brown scoop with two wafer rolls (chocolate with pirouettes). On Google, it is two scoops of strawberry and chocolate with rainbow sprinkles. On WhatsApp, it is a single scoop with a cherry. No two platforms agree on what a sundae looks like.

• •The Cherry Sunday advertisement, April 5, 1892. Chester Platt's Platt & Colt Pharmacy ran the ad in the Ithaca Daily Journal, the oldest written record of an ice cream sundae. Ithaca, New York still runs Sundae-themed events to commemorate it.
• •The Blue Law origin story. The sundae likely exists because of sabbath-day alcohol and soda restrictions. Pharmacies couldn't sell soda on Sunday, so they sold ice cream with the same syrups.
• •Ronald Reagan proclaims National Ice Cream Month, 1984. Reagan declared July National Ice Cream Month and the third Sunday National Ice Cream Day, which remains the single largest annual driver of 🍨 hashtag use on Twitter.
• •Anmitsu in the Meiji era. Anmitsu, Japan's layered agar and fruit dessert with a scoop of ice cream on top, is one of the 🍨-shaped precursors built into Japanese cafe culture since the late 1800s.

• •🍨 is U+1F368U+1F368. The soft-serve sibling 🍦 is U+1F366U+1F366. Do not confuse them in dessert-themed UX.
• •Google and Twitter render 🍨 with a blue bowl, most other platforms use white or gray. Mockup accordingly.
• •For seasonal features peaking National Ice Cream Day (third Sunday of July), 🍨 is the correct pick over 🍦 because its sundae shape reads as celebratory.
• •Shortcodes vary: :ice_cream::ice_cream: usually maps to 🍨 but some platforms reverse this with :icecream::icecream: for the cone. Always test.

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