Lollipop Emoji

🍭 is a swirled lollipop on a stick. Across platforms, it's almost always drawn as a rainbow-striped spiral disc with a white stick, Google shows a full rainbow, Apple goes pink-and-red swirl, Samsung swapped from candy-cane stripes to rainbow in the mid-2010s. Approved in Unicode 6.0 (2010) alongside 🍬, 🍫, and 🍮 in the first big food batch.

In texting, 🍭 does one of two things: it signals playful/childlike sweetness, or it flirts. The childlike reading covers birthday parties, kids' cartoons, nostalgia content, and 'sugar rush' energy. The flirty reading borrows the old euphemism where 'lollipop' suggests oral sex, and shows up in sexting alongside 🍆, 🥒, 🍑, or 😈. Same emoji, two totally different registers.

Context tells you which one. 🍭 with 🎈🎂🧸 is a birthday. 🍭 with 👅 or 😈 from a crush at 1am is not. Kids and Sanrio fans use it constantly and innocently; in adult dating-app chat, it often carries a wink.

What makes 🍭 different from 🍬 is the stick. Candy you unwrap, a lollipop you lick, and the verb 'lick' is what opens the door to the double meaning. Lil Wayne's 2008 'Lollipop') didn't invent the metaphor; it just made it #1 on the Billboard Hot 100 for five weeks and earned the first RIAA Diamond certification of Wayne's career.

🍭 lives in the flattest part of the candy family's Google Trends data. While 🍬 spikes every October and 🍫 peaks for Valentine's, searches for 'lollipop emoji' stay between 11 and 17 all year long. No seasonal heartbeat. Kids, aesthetic content, and flirt-coded DMs keep a steady baseline hum year-round.

On TikTok and Instagram, 🍭 is part of the recognizable candycore / y2k set alongside 🍬🎀🧸🦋. It also dominates children's birthday content, Candyland-themed photo shoots, and nostalgic 90s/2000s throwbacks, candy lipstick, ring pops, Chupa Chups throwback posts. The Sanrio soft-girl aesthetic absolutely loves it.

In dating and flirting contexts, it's part of the dedicated sexting kit. Emojipedia notes it's used with 🍆, 🥒, 🥯, or 🍩 in messages meant to be read as suggestive. It's softer than the eggplant, more playful than explicit, which is why people who want to flirt without being crude reach for it.

In Japan, 🍭 reads mostly as childhood and festival food (matsuri candy stands, colorful striped lollipops handed out at summer festivals). In Western contexts, there's also a strong association with Kojak's bald-detective-sucking-a-Tootsie-Pop image from 1970s TV reruns, which is probably why older Millennials and Gen X send 🍭 in a completely different tone than Gen Z.

🍭 is the candy emoji that most reliably carries a flirty double meaning. 🍬 is friendly with occasional flirty spillover. 🍭 is split close to 50/50 in adult contexts, and context does almost all the work. Platform matters: Instagram and TikTok skew innocent, Hinge and Tinder skew flirty, Snapchat could go either way.

• •🍭 alone after a suggestive message = flirty escalation
• •🍭👅 or 🍭😈 = explicitly suggestive
• •🍭🎂🎈 = birthday, not flirty
• •🍭🧸🎀 = soft-girl aesthetic, not flirty
• •🍭🍆 = borderline explicit, read the room

People have been eating candy on a stick for thousands of years, the ancient Egyptians coated nuts in honey and used reeds as handles. But the specific 'lollipop' as we know it has two origin claims, both pointing to early 20th-century America.

In 1908, George Smith of the Bradley Smith Company in New Haven, Connecticut started selling hard candy on a stick and called it 'Lolly Pop', after a prize-winning racehorse he'd seen at a local track. The Patent Office initially refused his trademark because the word 'lollipop' already appeared in an early-1800s English dictionary meaning 'a hard sweetmeat sometimes on a stick.' Smith eventually got the trademark in 1931 by splitting the name into two words: Lolly Pop.

Five years earlier (1916) in Connecticut, Racine Confectionery Machine Company claimed to have built the first automated lollipop machine. Both origin stories are probably right in their own way, Smith popularized the name, Racine popularized the production.

Then came the brand era. Dum Dums launched in 1924 from the Akron Candy Company, with the name picked by sales manager I. C. Bahr because 'any child can say it.' Chupa Chups came from Spain in 1958, invented by Enric Bernat after watching kids get sticky fingers, stick the candy on a stick, problem solved. Tootsie Pops followed in 1931, wrapping a Tootsie Roll in hard candy and inspiring the 1970 'how many licks?' commercial that became one of TV's most-quoted ads.

The emoji arrived in Unicode 6.0 in October 2010 and went mainstream with Emoji 1.0 in 2015.

1. 1908George Smith of Bradley Smith Co. starts selling hard candy on a stick called 'Lolly Pop' in New Haven, Connecticut
2. 1924Dum Dums launch from Akron Candy Company, named because 'any child can say it'
3. 1931Tootsie Pop launches, hard candy shell around a Tootsie Roll center
4. 1937Britain's first school crossing guard, Mary Hunt, is appointed in Bath. Her pole-shaped sign gets the nickname 'lollipop'
5. 1958Enric Bernat founds Chupa Chups in Spain after watching kids get sticky fingers from unwrapped candy
6. 1969Salvador Dalí designs the Chupa Chups logo in an hour, placing it on top of the candy rather than the side
7. 1970'How many licks does it take to get to the Tootsie Roll center of a Tootsie Pop?' commercial debuts↗
8. 1973'Kojak' premieres on CBS, Telly Savalas's lollipop-sucking detective becomes one of TV's most iconic images
9. 2008Lil Wayne's 'Lollipop' tops the Billboard Hot 100 for five weeks and wins a Grammy
10. 2010Lollipop emoji (U+1F36D) approved in Unicode 6.0↗

• •The name 'lollipop' was trademarked in 1931 by George Smith, who named the candy after his favorite racehorse, Lolly Pop.
• •In Britain, 'lollipop lady' (or man) is the official word for a school crossing guard, because their signs look like giant lollipops. The role was formalized by the 1953 School Crossing Patrol Act.
• •The Dum Dums 'Mystery Flavor' is a clever production hack: the machine doesn't pause between flavor batches, so the in-between candies, a blend of two flavors, get wrapped in the Mystery Flavor wrapper rather than thrown out.
• •Lil Wayne's 'Lollipop' topped the Billboard Hot 100 for five weeks in 2008) and became his first RIAA Diamond-certified single in 2022.
• •Kojak's Telly Savalas started sucking Tootsie Pops on-camera in 1973 because he was trying to quit smoking. 'Who loves ya, baby?' became one of TV's most-quoted catchphrases.
• •Pompompurin, Sanrio's golden retriever character, is named for purin (Japanese pudding), and his design was chosen in a 1996 in-house Sanrio contest. He's been the #1 Sanrio character in multiple years.
• •Salvador Dalí designed the Chupa Chups daisy-logo in a single hour in 1969, on the back of a newspaper. It's barely changed since.

• •Younger Gen Z sometimes assume every 🍭 is flirty. It's not, most 🍭 posts are candycore aesthetic or literal birthday content.
• •Parents reading 'DEA emoji code' lists sometimes assume 🍭 is automatically a drug code. It's not on the standard DEA list; that's 🍬. 🍭 is sexual-suggestive, not drug-coded.
• •Sending 🍭 to a male friend unironically can read as mocking, 'you're such a softie', depending on your friend group dynamics.

• •Kojak (1973–1978), Telly Savalas as the bald, lollipop-sucking NYPD detective made Tootsie Pops an accessory of 1970s cool. 'Who loves ya, baby?' is still quoted 50 years later.
• •Tootsie Pop's 'How Many Licks?' commercial (1970), The owl licking the pop three times and biting in is one of the most-parodied ads in American TV history. Tootsie refreshed the spot with a modern remake in 2025.
• •Lil Wayne, 'Lollipop' (2008), Five weeks at #1 on the Billboard Hot 100, Grammy for Best Rap Song, and Wayne's first Diamond-certified single. The song put the 'lollipop = oral sex' metaphor on the cultural main stage.
• •BTS 'Butter' MV (2021), Kim Taehyung (V) kissing a lollipop in the 'Butter' music video drove ARMY into meltdown on release night. He said he channeled Johnny Depp's Cry-Baby for the scene.
• •Chupa Chups space run (1995), Chupa Chups became the first candy in space when Russian cosmonauts took them to the Mir station. The company's marketing has never been subtle.
• •France Gall, 'Les Sucettes' (1966), Serge Gainsbourg's song for Gall, full of double meanings about aniseed lollipops, is one of the most-cited French pop examples of the lollipop/sex metaphor. Gall later said she didn't fully understand the innuendo when she recorded it.

• •Lollipop is U+1F36DU+1F36D, part of the Food & Drink block in Unicode 6.0 (2010).
• •Shortcodes: :lollipop::lollipop: on Slack, Discord, and GitHub.
• •Platform color varies: Google/Apple/Twitter show rainbow swirl; older Samsung and Microsoft versions showed red-and-white candy-cane stripes. Modern Samsung (One UI 3+) switched to rainbow.
• •Unlike 🍬, 🍭 has no meaningful seasonal spike, year-round flat usage with no Q4 bump. Don't tag it as a Halloween emoji in your recommender.
• •No variant forms. No skin tone modifiers.

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