Nauseated Face Emoji

A yellow-green face with furrowed eyebrows, a small frown, and puffed-out cheeks that look ready to burst. On most platforms the cheeks flush red or pink, like someone fighting to keep their lunch down. The whole face has a sickly green tint, a universal visual shorthand for nausea that predates the emoji by decades (see: Mr. Yuk, the fluorescent green poison warning sticker that's been on household chemicals since 1971).

Officially named "Nauseated Face" in Unicode 9.0 (2016), 🤢 arrived a full year before its more dramatic sibling 🤮 Face Vomiting, which debuted in Unicode 10.0 (2017). That timing matters: for a year, 🤢 was the only dedicated disgust emoji, and it cemented itself as the go-to reaction for anything revolting. Even after 🤮 arrived, 🤢 kept its lane. The difference is intensity and timing. 🤢 is the moment before. The swallow. The "I'm going to be sick." 🤮 is the moment after. 🤢 holds it in. 🤮 doesn't.

In practice, 🤢 is used far more for figurative disgust than actual illness. Someone's bad take on Twitter? 🤢. An ex posting cringe? 🤢. A food combination that shouldn't exist (pineapple on pizza, for some people)? 🤢. The emoji became the visual shorthand for "the ick" — that sudden, visceral feeling of repulsion that dating culture turned into a whole genre of content. Ranked 168th overall and 70th among face emojis, with usage trending upward.

On social media, 🤢 is a judgment emoji. It says "I find this disgusting" with just one character. The target might be a gross food combination, a bad opinion, someone's outfit, a political stance, or anything the sender considers deeply unappealing. It's often deployed as a reply emoji — someone posts something, and you hit them with 🤢 as a complete sentence.

In dating and relationship content, 🤢 has become the unofficial emoji of "the ick." The ick — that sudden, inexplicable wave of repulsion toward someone you were previously attracted to — dominates TikTok dating discourse, and 🤢 is its visual companion. "He wore flip flops to dinner 🤢" or "She chews with her mouth open 🤢" are textbook ick captions.

In group chats, 🤢 serves as a solidarity emoji. When someone shares a disgusting story, responding with 🤢 says "I'm right there with you" without needing words. It's also used for self-deprecating humor: "just remembered something I said in 2019 🤢" is the nausea of cringe, not the nausea of food.

Gen Z leans into 🤢 as an ironic reaction more than older generations. A boomer might use it for actual food poisoning. A twenty-something uses it for a bad font choice.

🤢 is almost never flirty. It's a disgust emoji. If someone sends it in a dating context, they're expressing the ick — either about a third party (good for you) or about something you did (not good). The only flirty-adjacent use is playful mock disgust: "you're disgustingly cute 🤢" but even that is risky territory.

• •If it follows a story about someone else → they're bonding with you over shared disgust
• •If it follows something you said → they found it genuinely off-putting
• •Paired with 😂 → playful, mock disgust, probably fine
• •Standalone 🤢 with no context → they want you to ask what happened

The green face of disgust is an older cultural symbol than most people realize. In 1971, Dr. Richard Moriarty at the Children's Hospital of Pittsburgh created Mr. Yuk, a fluorescent green face with a grimacing expression, as a poison warning sticker for households with children. The skull-and-crossbones symbol wasn't working — kids associated it with pirates and found it appealing. So researchers tested different colored faces and expressions on children, and the "sick" face in bright green tested as the most repulsive. A child called the shade "yucky," and Mr. Yuk was born. Over 42 million stickers are distributed annually.

The cultural association between green and nausea runs deep. Cartoons have used green-tinged faces for seasickness since at least the 1940s. The phrase "green around the gills" dates to the 19th century. When the Unicode Consortium designed a nauseated emoji in 2016, the green face was an obvious choice. The design — puffed cheeks, furrowed brow, sickly tint — communicates "about to vomit" in a way that's instantly readable across cultures.

Approved in Unicode 9.0 (June 2016) as U+1F922U+1F922 NAUSEATED FACE. Added to Emoji 3.0 the same year. Part of the Supplemental Symbols and Pictographs block (U+1F900U+1F900–U+1F9FFU+1F9FF).

Before 🤢 existed, there was no dedicated disgust emoji. People improvised with 😷 (medical mask face) or just typed "ew." The Unicode Consortium added 🤢 alongside other expressive faces like 🤥 Lying Face and 🤧 Sneezing Face in the same release, filling a gap in the emotional vocabulary. A year later, 🤮 Face Vomiting arrived in Unicode 10.0 (2017), giving the nausea family a more extreme option. The two-step rollout created a natural escalation path: 🤢 → 🤮.

The green-equals-sick association is strongest in Western cultures, where "green around the gills" and green-faced cartoon characters established the convention decades ago. In Japan, sickness is more commonly associated with blue or pale white faces (hence the blue medical mask culture), and nausea in manga is typically shown with spiral eyes or a blue complexion rather than green.

In Chinese internet culture, 🤢 is used similarly to the West — for disgust reactions — but the cultural threshold for what warrants a 🤢 may differ. Food that's "disgusting" in one culture is a delicacy in another, and emoji reactions to food posts often expose these gaps.

The emoji's indirect meaning (moral disgust, disapproval) is universal across cultures. Whether you're in Brazil, Germany, or South Korea, sending 🤢 in response to someone's bad behavior communicates the same thing: "that makes me feel physically ill." The metaphor of nausea-as-disapproval crosses language barriers because disgust is one of the six basic universal emotions.

• •Before 🤢 was added in 2016, people had no dedicated disgust emoji. The closest options were 😷 (medical mask), which reads more as "sick" than "disgusted," or just typing "ew." The Unicode Consortium filled this gap with 🤢, and the emoji's usage has trended upward since its debut.
• •The Mr. Yuk sticker — a green grimacing face created in 1971 as a poison warning — is the spiritual ancestor of 🤢. Researchers at Pittsburgh Children's Hospital tested various designs on kids and found the green "sick" face was the one children liked least. A child called the color "yucky," and the name stuck.
• •The phrase "green around the gills" — meaning visibly nauseated — dates to at least the mid-19th century and likely influenced the decision to make the nauseated face emoji green rather than just pale yellow.
• •🤢 ranks 168th among all emojis and 70th among face emojis specifically. Its more extreme sibling 🤮 consistently outranks it in search volume, proving that on the internet, going all the way out is more popular than holding it in.
• •The puffed-out cheeks on 🤢 are a deliberate design choice across platforms — they suggest the face is holding back vomit, creating visual tension. It's one of the few emoji that depicts an action in progress rather than a completed state.

• •Sending 🤢 in response to someone's food from another culture can read as xenophobic rather than playful. Disgust is subjective, and the emoji amplifies judgment.
• •Some people interpret 🤢 as "I'm sick" (literal) while others read it as "that's disgusting" (figurative). In ambiguous contexts, the misread can cause unnecessary concern or missed empathy.
• •Using 🤢 toward someone you're dating without clear context about what disgusted you will almost certainly be interpreted as being about them. Always specify the target of your nausea.

• •The Mr. Yuk sticker, created in 1971 by Pittsburgh Children's Hospital, is a fluorescent green grimacing face used as a poison warning. Its design — green color, disgusted expression — predates the 🤢 emoji by 45 years and established the visual language the emoji inherited.
• •Green-faced nausea has been a cartoon staple since at least the 1940s. Characters turning green before getting sick appeared in Looney Tunes, Tom and Jerry, and later The Simpsons, cementing the green-means-sick visual convention.
• •The phrase "the ick" entered mainstream dating vocabulary through *Ally McBeal* (1997), where the character described getting an inexplicable wave of disgust toward a date. TikTok revived the concept in the 2020s, and 🤢 became its visual shorthand.

• •Codepoint: U+1F922U+1F922. Part of the Supplemental Symbols and Pictographs block (U+1F900U+1F900–U+1F9FFU+1F9FF).
• •Shortcodes: :nauseated_face::nauseated_face: on Slack, GitHub, and Discord.
• •Does not support skin tone modifiers.
• •In sentiment analysis, 🤢 is strongly negative. Unlike 😱 (which can be positive surprise), 🤢 is almost always expressing displeasure. Weight it as negative in both literal (illness) and figurative (disgust) contexts.
• •The green tint varies significantly across platforms. Apple and Google show a distinctly green face; Samsung historically used a more yellow-green. If building emoji displays, note the color inconsistency.

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