Jar Emoji

A glass jar with a lid. Simple object, enormous cultural footprint. The emoji was originally proposed as a condiment jar (L2/20-222) by Samantha Sunne and Andrea Hilborn, but the proposal was revised in January 2020 to depict an empty jar instead, because an empty jar can be anything: jam, pickles, sauce, savings, secrets, fireflies, your grandmother's preserved peaches. A jar full of something specific limits the metaphor. An empty jar invites it.

This flexibility is the emoji's superpower. It's used for cooking and canning content, homemade preserves, pantry organization, the cottagecore aesthetic, the "fill this jar" TikTok engagement trend, swear jars, tip jars, savings goals, and the occasional dark internet reference that we'll get to.

Platform designs vary more than you'd expect. Apple renders it as a clean, empty glass jar with a silver lid. Google and Samsung fill theirs with a reddish jam-like substance. WhatsApp goes with greenish contents. So depending on your phone, you're either sending an empty container or a jar of something that could be strawberry preserves or salsa verde. The jar emoji has an identity crisis built into its design.

🫙 clusters around a few distinct communities, each using it differently.

Food and homesteading. The biggest lane. Canning and preserving content on TikTok and Instagram uses 🫙 constantly: jam batches, pickled vegetables, fermented hot sauce, pantry shelfies. The cottagecore movement, which peaked around 2020-2021 but has since matured into a permanent subculture, treats the jar as a visual shorthand for "made from scratch" and "I don't buy this at the store." It pairs naturally with 🥒, 🍓, 🌶️, and 🍯.

The "fill this jar" TikTok trend. Creators post a jar emoji with a prompt like "fill this jar with ❤️" or "fill this jar with 💰 for a good cause." It's an engagement hack: the interactive format generates comments, which boosts the post in the algorithm. Emojipedia notes this is most common on charity and fundraiser posts.

Digital tip jars. Musicians, streamers, and baristas have co-opted jar imagery for online tipping. Twitch streamers use jar overlays on their donation pages. Street musicians link their Venmo with a jar icon. The physical tip jar went digital, and the emoji followed.

The swear jar. Every office has one (conceptually, at least). The concept dates to the 1890s but the term "swear jar" entered American English in the 1980s. It shows up in TV constantly: Luke Cage's barbershop, Lucifer's confusion about how one works, and a Bud Light commercial that won an Emmy, a Cannes Lion, and a Clio but was never aired on television.

Emotional metaphors. "Bottled up" feelings, keeping secrets, storing memories. 🫙 is becoming the emoji for containment, both physical and psychological.

The jar is one of humanity's oldest technologies. Clay jars for storing grain, oil, and wine date back to at least 7000 BCE in the Near East. The amphora (🏺), the two-handled ceramic vessel of ancient Greece and Rome, was essentially the shipping container of the ancient Mediterranean. But the glass jar as we know it is a more recent innovation, and its story involves Napoleon. Again.

In 1795, the French government offered a prize of 12,000 francs to anyone who could invent a reliable method of preserving food for military use. Nicolas Appert, a Parisian confectioner, spent 14 years experimenting with sealing food in glass jars and heating them. By 1809, he'd cracked it: food sealed in airtight glass containers and heated to high temperatures stayed edible for months. He won the prize in 1810, published his method, and became the "father of canning." The remarkable part: Appert never understood why his method worked. Louis Pasteur wouldn't explain the microbiology behind it until the 1860s, fifty years later. Appert was right for the wrong reasons, and it saved armies.

Then came the mason jar. In 1858, American tinsmith John Landis Mason patented an "Improvement in Screw-Neck Bottles" (US Patent 22186A), the first reliably re-sealable glass jar. His innovation was grinding the lip of the glass flat enough for a rubber gasket to create an airtight seal. Mason jars transformed home food preservation from a risky, spoilage-prone process into something any household could do safely.

Mason's patent expired in 1879, and the Ball brothers immediately seized the opportunity. In 1880, five brothers bought a small company with a $200 loan from their uncle. By 1884, they were manufacturing glass home-canning jars. The name "Ball" became so synonymous with mason jars that people still call them "Ball jars" even when they're made by other companies. "Mason" became a genericized trademark, like Band-Aid or Kleenex.

The mason jar had a second life in the 2010s as a hipster drinking vessel. Brooklyn cocktail bars started serving drinks in them. Instagram made the aesthetic go viral. Cold brew in a mason jar photographed better than cold brew in a paper cup, and in the attention economy, appearance is currency.

The jar emoji was proposed as L2/20-222 by Samantha Sunne and Andrea Hilborn of Emojination, a grassroots organization that helps underrepresented groups submit emoji proposals. The original pitch was for a condiment jar, arguing that the only condiment emoji was 🍯 Honey Pot and that "a condiment jar is an extremely common feature in kitchens around the world." On January 15, 2020, the proposal was updated to remove condiment-specific references and propose an empty jar instead, a strategic move that broadened its appeal.

The jar was approved in Unicode 14.0 (September 2021) as U+1FAD9U+1FAD9 with keywords: jar, container, empty, sauce, spread, condiment, save, storage. Google shipped it first on October 27, 2021 with Android 12L. Apple followed on March 14, 2022 with iOS 15.4. The fact that Google fills the jar with jam while Apple leaves it empty reflects the tension in the original proposal: should it represent a specific thing or an empty vessel for anything?

1. 1795Napoleon's government offers 12,000 francs for a food preservation method↗
2. 1809Nicolas Appert succeeds in preserving food in sealed glass jars. Wins the prize, publishes his method↗
3. 1858John Landis Mason patents the screw-neck glass jar (US 22186A), enabling home canning↗
4. 1884Ball brothers begin manufacturing mason jars. "Ball" becomes synonymous with the product↗
5. 2020Samantha Sunne and Andrea Hilborn submit the jar emoji proposal (L2/20-222) to Unicode↗
6. 2021Jar emoji approved in Unicode 14.0 (September). Google ships first on October 27 with Android 12L↗
7. 2022Apple adds jar emoji in iOS 15.4 (March 14). Designs vary: Apple empty, Google jam-filled↗

Jars carry different cultural weight depending on what goes inside them.

In Korea, the traditional fermentation vessel is the onggi, a breathable clay jar used for making kimchi, doenjang (soybean paste), and gochujang (red pepper paste). Kimchi fermentation in onggi pots is a centuries-old practice, and the process (kimjang) was inscribed by UNESCO as Intangible Cultural Heritage in 2013. Korean food culture doesn't just use jars for storage, it considers the jar itself part of the recipe.

Germany and Eastern Europe have deep sauerkraut traditions. The fermentation crock (Gärtopf) is a purpose-built ceramic jar with a water-seal lid, designed for lacto-fermenting cabbage. Sauerkraut-making is associated with autumn harvest in German-speaking countries and Ashkenazi Jewish cooking traditions.

Poland treats the preserving jar with near-religious seriousness. "Przetwory" (home preserves) are a cultural institution. Polish grandmothers measure their competence partly by the number and quality of preserved jars in the pantry. A well-stocked pantry shelf of home-canned vegetables, fruits, and compotes is a point of family pride.

In the American South, canning is tied to rural self-sufficiency and farming heritage. County fairs judge home-canned preserves competitively. Ball mason jars are kitchen equipment with generational significance. The mason jar also carries class and aesthetic connotations in the US: it's been co-opted by both the back-to-the-land movement and the craft cocktail scene.

In Japan, the practice of umeboshi (pickled plum) production in glass jars is a summer ritual. Japanese home fermentation culture uses both ceramic and glass vessels for miso, tsukemono (pickles), and fruit wines.

• •The world's oldest known storage jars are from the Neolithic period (around 7000 BCE), found in the Near East. They stored grain, oil, and wine. Humans have been putting stuff in jars for at least 9,000 years.
• •A Bud Light "Swear Jar" commercial from 2008 won an Emmy, a Cannes Lion Gold, and a Silver Clio, but was never aired on television because it was an internet-only entry. The ad shows an office where the swear jar funds a case of beer by Friday.
• •The mason jar and canning supplies market is worth about $27 billion (2024). That's larger than the entire market for craft beer in several countries. Jars are big business.
• •Christina Perri's "Jar of Hearts" debuted on So You Think You Can Dance on June 30, 2010, and was rushed to iTunes before it was even finished being produced. It hit #20 on the overall chart within days. A dance competition accidentally launched a pop career.
• •In 2020, the COVID canning boom caused mason jar shortages across the United States. Ball brand jars sold out at hardware stores, Walmart, and Amazon. People traded jar leads on Facebook groups the way they'd shared toilet paper tips months earlier.

• •The jar emoji carries an NSFW connotation in certain internet communities, originating from a 2014 4chan thread. If you're using 🫙 in a context where internet-literate audiences might misread it, consider adding context. Most people won't make the association, but some will.
• •Because platform designs differ (empty vs. jam-filled), a jar you send as a metaphor for "potential" or "savings" might arrive looking like "strawberry jam." The meaning can shift with the device.
• •In some "fill this jar" TikTok contexts, the jar prompt is a genuine community-building tool. In others, it's pure engagement bait with no real purpose. Readers can usually tell the difference.

• •Christina Perri's "Jar of Hearts" (2010) used the jar as a metaphor for emotional hoarding. She wrote it about a real ex who wanted her back, hiding in her childhood bedroom in Philadelphia to avoid him. The song debuted on So You Think You Can Dance before it was even officially released and hit #20 on iTunes in days. The jar of hearts metaphor entered the pop culture lexicon permanently.
• •The swear jar trope appears across dozens of TV shows: Pop's barbershop in Luke Cage (2016), Lucifer's misunderstanding of how one works ("You extort money from your own child?"), and New Girl's loft jar for Schmidt's douchebag behavior. TV Tropes has a dedicated page cataloging appearances.
• •Netflix's "History of Swear Words" (2021), hosted by Nicolas Cage, is a documentary series about profanity that makes the swear jar concept academic. Six episodes, one word each, Cage yelling every one of them. The show's existence proves the swear jar has become a cultural artifact worth analyzing.
• •The mason jar as hipster drinking vessel peaked around 2012-2015 when Brooklyn cocktail bars and Portland coffee shops served everything in them. InsideHook ran an article titled "Seriously, Can We Retire the Mason Jar as a Cocktail Glass?" The answer was no. Cold brew in a mason jar photographs better than cold brew in a paper cup, and Instagram photography won.
• •The 2014 jar meme from 4chan became one of the internet's most notorious NSFW references. It involved a My Little Pony figurine in a jar, was covered by BuzzFeed News, and has since turned "putting something in a jar" into an unintentional double entendre in online communities. Most people don't know this reference, but internet veterans recognize it instantly.
• •Benjamin Franklin's 1752 kite experiment captured electricity in a Leyden jar, a proto-capacitor that stored electrical charge. This is where "lightning in a bottle" comes from. Franklin literally put lightning in a jar, and we turned it into an idiom for impossible achievements.

• •Jar is encoded at U+1FAD9U+1FAD9 in Unicode 14.0. Single codepoint, no variation selectors or ZWJ sequences.
• •Discord shortcode: :jar::jar:. Slack may use :jar::jar: as well but support varies by workspace version.
• •Be aware that platform rendering differs significantly (empty vs. filled). If your application logic depends on the jar being "empty" (e.g., a savings tracker), consider adding text context alongside the emoji.

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