Men’s Room Emoji

🚹 is the men's room sign: a single male stick figure in a blue square. It's one corner of the global restroom triad with 🚺 (women's room) and 🚻 (shared). Most platforms render it in blue, which is not a Unicode requirement but an inherited convention from US and European signage.

In texting, 🚹 shows up in wayfinding ("men's is on the left"), in jokes about men's-restroom chaos at concerts and sports events, and in discussions of gendered facilities and who uses which one. Because the "male" stick figure in the sign is also the default figure in every other wayfinding icon (see: crosswalks, fire extinguisher signs, emergency exits), 🚹 sometimes carries a quiet subtext about masculinity as the unmarked category.

Emojipedia calls it Men's Room. Unicode's original name is "Mens Symbol" (no apostrophe). Approved in Unicode 6.0 (October 2010), codepoint U+1F6B9U+1F6B9.

Usage is pragmatic more than poetic. Sports fans use 🚹 in arena directions threads. Festival attendees use it in tactical posts about which men's restroom has the shortest line. Musicians post 🚹 in tour-bus chaos captions. Parents use it in "single dad taking kid to restroom" posts where the gendered split matters.

On X, 🚹 enters political discourse mainly through bathroom-bill debates. A post showing 🚹 and 🚺 side by side usually signals a traditionalist take; a post showing 🚻 alone signals inclusivity. It's one of the few emoji pairs where the choice itself is an opinion.

The emoji rarely travels on TikTok because the platform prefers the combined 🚻 or the gender-specific 👨👩 figures. Instagram uses 🚹 mostly in architecture and interior-design accounts that document wayfinding signage.

Men's restroom signage goes back to Otl Aicher's 1972 Munich Olympics pictogram system. Aicher standardized a grid-based stick figure and used it for every sport, wayfinding, and information icon. For restrooms, the men's figure was the base template; women's got a dress added to signal gender.

Roger Cook and Don Shanosky's 1974 AIGA/DOT set refined Aicher's work into 34 copyright-free symbols for the US Department of Transportation. They sketched hundreds of variations and tested them across multiple countries for legibility, vandalism resistance, and cross-cultural readability. The men's figure they picked became the global standard.

The emoji was approved in Unicode 6.0 (October 2010) under the name "Mens Symbol" (no apostrophe). Emojipedia and every major platform display it as "Men's Room." Codepoint U+1F6B9U+1F6B9. Shortcodes: :mens::mens:, :men_s_room::men_s_room:.

In the US and Canada, 🚹 is always blue. Japan uses blue too but often pairs it with the kanji 男 and color-coded backgrounds. In much of Europe, 🚹 signage uses a simple black stick figure on white rather than blue. Saudi Arabia and some Gulf countries use thobe-wearing silhouettes rather than the AIGA generic figure. The emoji, however, is rendered in blue on every major platform.

Men's restrooms differ substantially by country. US and UK men's rooms heavily use urinals, which is rare in Japan (where stalls are standard) and uncommon in parts of continental Europe. Some Chinese cities have "modern" men's rooms with both stalls and urinals and "traditional" men's rooms with open squat toilets. The 🚹 emoji covers all of this with one picture, which is what a pictogram is supposed to do.

In Nordic countries and in Dutch cafés, gender-neutral single-stall restrooms are increasingly the default, and 🚹 is mostly found on high-volume multi-stall facilities only.

• •The 🚹 stick figure is also the figure used on emergency exit signs, crosswalk signs, and "person at work" signs. It's the AIGA/DOT default human.
• •Unicode's internal name is "Mens Symbol" with no apostrophe. CLDR's short name added the apostrophe. Most vendors display "Men's Room".
• •Japanese men's rooms are called 男子トイレ (danshi toire) and often use red/blue color coding on top of the kanji 男 rather than the Western stick figure.
• •The US average men's restroom wait time is 30 seconds versus 90 seconds for women's. Building codes in some US states now require 2:1 women's-to-men's toilet ratios to compensate.
• •The first gender-segregated restrooms in recorded history were at a Parisian ball in 1739. Men and women had chamber pots in separate rooms. The concept took a century to become standard public infrastructure.
• •During the 2008 Beijing Olympics, organizers briefly experimented with removing the "dress" from 🚺 signs and adding different-colored 🚹 variants instead. The change was reversed after visitor complaints that the signs were impossible to read quickly.

• •Codepoint: U+1F6B9U+1F6B9. Unicode name: "MENS SYMBOL" (uppercase, no apostrophe).
• •Shortcodes: :mens::mens: on GitHub, Slack, Discord. Also :men_s_room::men_s_room: on some systems.
• •Pairs naturally with U+1F6BAU+1F6BA (🚺 Women's Room), U+1F6BBU+1F6BB (🚻 Restroom), and U+1F6BEU+1F6BE (🚾 Water Closet). All four from the same Unicode 6.0 batch.
• •Every major vendor renders in blue. There's no variation selector for color changes. If your design needs a different color (e.g. for a club or venue), create a custom asset.

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