Lungs Emoji

A pair of pink anatomical lungs with the trachea and bronchial tubes visible. Approved in Unicode 13.0 on March 10, 2020 as U+1FAC1U+1FAC1 LUNGS, part of a batch that also included 🫀 Anatomical Heart, and released into the world at the exact moment the WHO declared COVID-19 a pandemic.

🫁 was proposed by Dr. Shuhan He of Massachusetts General Hospital, alongside Melissa Thermidor (NHS UK), Christian Kamkoff (Columbia MFA), and Emojination's Jennifer Lee. Their March 2019 proposal made a simple case: respiratory disease is a top-five killer worldwide, the lung is central to countless health conversations, and there was no way to picture one in a chart, a text message, or a public-health campaign. The proposal even sketched compound uses: lungs + person running = aerobic exercise, lungs + no-smoking = quit campaigns.

Health and medical contexts. The primary use. Pulmonologists, respiratory therapists, public-health accounts, asthma advocates, and COPD educators reach for 🫁 constantly. Hospital social-media teams use it for lung-cancer awareness (November) and World Asthma Day (early May).

Breathwork and wellness. The secondary lane. Wim Hof breathing, box breathing (4-4-4-4), and the 4-7-8 technique all blew up on TikTok between 2021 and 2024. 🫁 anchors the captions. "Box breathe before the meeting 🫁" is a normal post.

Vaping and smoking discourse. The tension lane. 🫁 shows up in quit-vaping content, FDA warnings, and harm-reduction debates. Youth vaping fell to 1.63 million in 2024, the lowest rate in a decade, and 🫁 was all over the awareness campaigns that helped drive that number down.

Air quality alerts. PM2.5 pollution kills roughly 4.9 million people a year; only seven countries meet WHO air-quality standards. Wildfire-season AQI alerts in the US West and Canada, plus smog advisories across South Asia, keep 🫁 in regular rotation.

🫁 skews earnest and medical-adjacent. It's not a joke emoji; it tends to appear in captions that are either informational, advocacy-flavored, or wellness-branded.

By account type. Doctors, nurses, and physical therapists use it in earnest patient-education posts. Running and cycling accounts use it to signal cardio content ("training 🫁🏃"). Meditation and mental-health creators lean on it during breathwork tutorials. Anti-vaping advocacy and lung-cancer charities rely on it year-round.

By platform. On X it trends during wildfire smoke events, air-quality emergencies, and public-health announcements. On Instagram it appears in gym reels, breath-holding challenges, and health-awareness months. On TikTok it's the caption emoji for breathing tutorials, quit-vape transformation content, and the "anxiety-to-calm" genre that box-breathing videos anchored.

Understated use. Because it arrived during COVID, 🫁 carries quiet pandemic weight for anyone who remembers March 2020. People who lost family to respiratory illness sometimes use it as a memorial marker — subtle, personal, not the default read.

🫁 was never going to be a ha-ha emoji. Dr. Shuhan He, an ER physician at Mass General, had spent years watching patients try to describe shortness of breath, chest tightness, and wheeze in text messages to doctors. His lung proposal, submitted March 30, 2019, argued that the lung was "essential to the respiratory process and significant to discussions of health, air quality, and one of the most universal and basic biological functions: breathing." The proposal was co-signed by Melissa Thermidor at NHS UK, MFA candidate Christian Kamkoff, and Jennifer Lee at Emojination.

Unicode approved the proposal in early 2020 as part of a 117-emoji batch. The timing was extraordinary: the Boston Globe interviewed He in February 2020 about the approval, still weeks before most people understood what COVID-19 would become. By the time 🫁 landed on keyboards in late 2020 and 2021, it was already indispensable. He told the Globe he hoped doctors and patients would use the new emojis to describe symptoms, illustrate medical situations, and make complex health information more accessible. That's what happened, faster and more urgently than anyone planned.

1. 2019Proposal L2/19-149 submitted to Unicode by He, Thermidor, Kamkoff, and Lee. Makes the case that respiratory health deserves keyboard coverage.↗
2. 2020Unicode 13.0 approves the lungs emoji in January 2020; released March 10. Apple ships it in iOS 14.2 (November 2020); Google in Android 11 (late 2020).↗
3. 2020COVID-19 declared a pandemic by the WHO on March 11, one day after Emoji 13.0 was released. 🫁 becomes instantly, tragically relevant.↗
4. 2021Wim Hof breathing and box-breathing tutorials cross billions of views on TikTok. 🫁 becomes the standard caption emoji for breathwork content.↗
5. 2024Youth e-cigarette use in the US drops to 5.9%, the lowest in a decade; 🫁 appears across the awareness campaigns credited with the decline.↗

• •🫁 was proposed by ER physician Dr. Shuhan He along with NHS's Melissa Thermidor, Columbia MFA Christian Kamkoff, and Emojination's Jennifer Lee. Submission date: March 30, 2019.
• •The lung and anatomical heart proposals moved together through Unicode in 2019–2020. They weren't a package, but they were in the same medical-emoji push.
• •Emoji 13.0 went live March 10, 2020. The WHO declared COVID-19 a pandemic one day later, March 11.
• •PM2.5 air pollution contributed to roughly 4.9 million deaths worldwide in 2023. India and China account for 56% of the global mortality burden.
• •Only seven countries met WHO air-quality guidelines in 2024: Australia, Estonia, New Zealand, Iceland, Grenada, Puerto Rico, and French Polynesia. Everywhere else, 🫁 is a real daily concern.
• •US youth e-cigarette use hit a decade low in 2024: 5.9% of middle and high schoolers, down from 27.5% in 2019.
• •Adult human lungs hold roughly 6 liters of air at full inspiration. The right lung has three lobes; the left only has two (it shares chest-space with the heart).
• •The 4-7-8 breathing technique (popularized by Dr. Andrew Weil) activates the parasympathetic nervous system. Studies show measurable drops in heart rate and cortisol inside one minute.

• •The Wim Hof Method became a billion-view TikTok category from 2021 onward, with 🫁 as its default caption emoji.
• •Dr. Andrew Weil's 4-7-8 breathing technique was already old when TikTok got hold of it in 2022; it's now a top-50 search on wellness TikTok and 🫁 lives in every tutorial.
• •The 2023 Canadian wildfire smoke over New York City turned 🫁😷 into a stock image combination on news Twitter for two weeks straight.
• •The NHS in the UK uses 🫁 in official Stoptober quit-smoking campaign materials each October.

• •🫁 is U+1FAC1U+1FAC1. Shortcodes: :lungs::lungs: on Slack, Discord, GitHub.
• •Block: Symbols and Pictographs Extended-A (U+1FA70U+1FA70–U+1FAFFU+1FAFF), same block as 🫀 (Anatomical Heart).
• •No skin-tone variants. Treated as an object, like 🦷, 🦴, 🫀, and 🧠.
• •Platform rendering varies: Apple and Google show pink healthy lungs; Samsung draws bronchi more distinctly; Microsoft's Fluent set leans toward a flat two-tone pink. All versions include the trachea.

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