Leftwards Hand Emoji

An open hand extended to the left, palm facing the viewer. It looks like someone reaching out, offering something, or gesturing to the side. Simple enough on its own, but its real reason for existing is more interesting than its everyday use.

🫲 was created alongside its mirror 🫱 (Rightwards Hand) specifically to solve a problem that had annoyed emoji users for years: the 🤝 handshake emoji couldn't show two different skin tones. If you applied a skin tone modifier to the old 🤝, both hands changed color. There was no way to represent a handshake between people of different skin tones. Jennifer Daniel, Google's creative director for emoji, proposed the fix in November 2019: create separate left and right hand emojis that each accept their own skin tone modifier, then combine them via ZWJ into a handshake with 25 possible skin tone combinations.

Outside of its handshake engineering purpose, people use 🫲 to present something ("here, look at this"), to indicate a direction, or paired with 🫱 to frame text or emojis between two hands. It reads as an offering gesture, a gentle "take this" or "over to you."

The most common standalone use is pointing at or presenting something. In group chats you'll see it before a link or recommendation ("🫲 check this out"), or paired with its mirror to sandwich text between hands for emphasis. On TikTok and Twitter/X, the 🫷🫸 (pushing hands) get used more for the framing trend, but 🫲🫱 serves a similar role with a softer, open-palm energy.

In professional settings it's relatively neutral. It reads as "here you go" or "over to you" in Slack, which makes it useful for handoffs in async work. It doesn't carry the same loaded meanings as pointing fingers (👉) or the ambiguity of 👍.

The multi-skin-tone handshake combinations (like 🫱🏿‍🫲🏻) have become popular in corporate diversity communications, LinkedIn posts about inclusion, and brand marketing. Whether that's meaningful representation or performative depends on who you ask, but the technical achievement of enabling it required years of work at Unicode.

The Leftwards Hand emoji exists because of a handshake.

For years, the 🤝 emoji had a problem. When you applied a skin tone modifier, both hands changed to the same color. There was no way to show two people of different skin tones shaking hands. Jennifer Daniel, Google's creative director for emoji and chair of the Unicode Emoji Subcommittee, noticed the gap in 2019 and started working on a fix.

The technical challenge was that 🤝 was a single codepoint. You can't apply two different modifiers to one character. Daniel's solution: create two new component emojis, a rightwards hand (🫱) and a leftwards hand (🫲), each accepting its own skin tone. Combine them with a ZWJ (Zero Width Joiner), and you get a handshake where each hand can have a different skin tone. That's 5 × 5 = 25 possible combinations.

She submitted the formal proposal in November 2019, expecting it to land on devices in 2021. Then COVID-19 hit, and all Unicode deployments were delayed six months. The irony of a handshake emoji being delayed by a pandemic that made handshakes taboo was not lost on anyone. It finally shipped in Unicode 14.0 (September 2021) and reached devices in 2022.

So 🫲 was born as infrastructure, a building block for something bigger. That it's useful on its own as a gesture emoji is a bonus.

Approved in Unicode 14.0 (September 2021) as part of Emoji 14.0. Codepoint U+1FAF2U+1FAF2. Part of the "People & Body" category, subcategory "Open Hand with Fingers." Created as a component emoji to enable multi-skin-tone handshake ZWJ sequences. It's a modifier base, meaning it accepts any of the five Fitzpatrick skin tone modifiers (U+1F3FBU+1F3FB through U+1F3FFU+1F3FF).

1. 2019Jennifer Daniel (Google) submits proposal for multi-skin-tone handshake components to Unicode↗
2. 2020COVID-19 delays all Unicode deployments by six months. A handshake emoji held up by a pandemic.
3. 2021Unicode 14.0 / Emoji 14.0 ratified. 🫲 and 🫱 ship as new modifier-base hand emojis↗
4. 2022Multi-skin-tone handshakes (🫱🏿‍🫲🏻 etc.) reach iOS, Android, and major platforms

The left hand carries significant cultural weight in parts of the Middle East, North Africa, and South Asia. In Islamic tradition, the left hand is associated with bodily hygiene and considered impure for social interactions. Eating, greeting, and giving/receiving with the left hand is considered rude in many Muslim-majority countries. A leftward-facing open palm could be read differently in these contexts than in Western cultures where hand orientation carries no particular social meaning.

That said, the emoji represents a right hand facing left (anatomically, the thumb is on top and pinky on the bottom). It's showing the palm of a right hand, not depicting a left hand. But at emoji sizes, that anatomical distinction isn't always clear, and cultural associations with "leftward" gestures can still trigger discomfort.

In business contexts globally, the multi-skin-tone handshake built from 🫲 + 🫱 has been widely adopted as a diversity and inclusion symbol. LinkedIn, corporate presentations, and brand marketing use these combinations frequently.

• •🫲 was engineered as infrastructure for the multi-skin-tone handshake. Jennifer Daniel proposed it in 2019 because the old 🤝 couldn't show two different skin tones.
• •COVID-19 delayed the handshake emoji by six months. A handshake, delayed by a pandemic that eliminated handshakes. You can't script irony that clean.
• •Despite being called "Leftwards Hand," it's anatomically a right hand. The name describes the direction it faces (leftward), not which hand it belongs to. Look at the thumb position: top of the hand, which means it's the right palm.
• •The five Fitzpatrick skin tone modifiers applied to both 🫲 and 🫱 create 25 unique handshake combinations. Before Emoji 14.0, there was exactly one: both hands the same color.

• •Sending 🫲 in a Middle Eastern or South Asian group chat: while it's a right hand anatomically, the leftward orientation can still feel uncomfortable given cultural associations with the left hand and impurity. When in doubt, use 🤝 instead.
• •Confusing 🫲 (open palm offering) with 🫷 (pushing hand rejection). At small sizes they look similar, but the social signals are opposite. One says "here, take this," the other says "stop" or "no thanks."

• •LinkedIn embraced the multi-skin-tone handshake (built from 🫲🫱) almost immediately after its release. It became one of the most-used emoji combinations in corporate diversity posts, second only to ✊ raised fist variants.
• •The open-palm offer gesture (which 🫲 captures) is a staple of meme culture. The "here, king, you dropped this" format, where someone presents a crown to another person, is the energy 🫲👑 channels.

• •Codepoint: U+1FAF2U+1FAF2. Shortcode: :leftwards_hand::leftwards_hand: on platforms that support it.
• •This is a modifier base. Appending U+1F3FBU+1F3FB through U+1F3FFU+1F3FF creates skin tone variants.
• •Multi-skin-tone handshakes are ZWJ sequences: 🫱🫱 + skin tone + U+200DU+200D + 🫲🫲 + skin tone. That's 25 combinations total.
• •In JavaScript, '🫲'.length'🫲'.length returns 2 (surrogate pair). The skin tone variant '🫲🏻'.length'🫲🏻'.length returns 4.
• •When building emoji pickers, group 🫲 with 🫱, 🫳, 🫴 as the directional hand set from Emoji 14.0.

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