No Smoking Emoji

A lit cigarette inside the red circle-and-slash, the universal no-smoking sign. 🚭 is the single most recognizable prohibition pictogram on Earth, installed on airplanes, hospitals, restaurants, classrooms, and most indoor public spaces since the global smoking-ban wave of the 1980s and 1990s. Under ISO 7010 safety signs, it is sign P002: Smoking prohibited.

Literal uses: signalling smoke-free zones, health PSAs, and personal quit-smoking journeys. Figurative uses: posting 🚭 as shorthand for "quit that habit" or "this isn't good for me anymore." Sometimes it stands in for vaping in parallel content, though a dedicated 🚭-for-vape emoji doesn't exist.

Added in Unicode 6.0 (October 2010) at codepoint U+1F6AD. Like most of the original 722-emoji batch, it came from Japanese mobile carrier sets, where no-smoking pictograms were already universal on subway and office signage by the early 2000s.

Health communication is the biggest vertical. Public-health accounts, schools, hospitals, and tobacco-cessation programs use 🚭 in posts about smoke-free rules and quit support. The most successful example is the Truth Initiative's #ThisIsQuitting campaign, which pulled 1.4 billion views on TikTok partly on the back of the 🚭 emoji.

Personal posts: "30 days 🚭" or "quit vaping 🚭 my lungs thank me." Here 🚭 doubles as a quit-streak marker, a badge. Gym accounts, wellness influencers, and recovery communities use it as a clean, universally legible shorthand for "no smoking or nicotine anymore."

Metaphorical extension: "gossip 🚭," "ex 🚭," "stress eating 🚭." Here it works like 🚫 but carries the vice-quitting connotation, which makes it funnier and more specific. On Instagram, bio decorations like "coffee ☕ running 🏃 🚭" signal lifestyle values.

The no-smoking sign became universal faster than almost any other safety symbol. The physical sign was codified under ISO 3864 and later ISO 7010 as pictogram P002, using the general prohibition circle over a lit-cigarette silhouette. The American Institute of Graphic Arts (AIGA) produced the US-standard version in the late 1970s as part of federal transportation signage work.

Real-world deployment raced ahead of design standards. Aurigny Air Services, based in the Bailiwick of Guernsey, became the first airline to ban smoking entirely in July 1977. The US Civil Aeronautics Board had already required segregated smoking sections on passenger aircraft since 1973. The US federal smoking ban on domestic flights under two hours took effect January 1, 1988; the six-hour ban followed in February 1990. The "no smoking" sign was permanently lit on all US domestic flights that same month. Canada banned smoking on all its flights in 1994, the EU in 1997.

Restaurants, offices, and public spaces followed through the 1990s and 2000s. By the time Unicode added 🚭 to version 6.0 in October 2010, the sign was already installed on every airport wall and hotel door in the world. The emoji simply brought a 40-year-old piece of public infrastructure into text.

1. 1969Consumer advocate Ralph Nader publicly calls for a smoking ban on US airlines.
2. 1971United Airlines creates the first nonsmoking section on a US carrier.
3. 1973Civil Aeronautics Board requires all US airlines to segregate smoking and non-smoking sections.
4. 1977Aurigny Air Services in the Bailiwick of Guernsey becomes the first airline to ban smoking entirely (July).
5. 1978AIGA completes US federal transportation pictogram set. The no-smoking symbol is standardized.
6. 1988US bans smoking on domestic flights under 2 hours (January 1).
7. 1990US bans smoking on all domestic flights under 6 hours. The 'no smoking' sign is permanently lit (February 25).
8. 1994Canada becomes the first country to ban smoking on all flights operated by its carriers.
9. 1997European Union bans smoking on all member-state flights.
10. 2000US extends smoking ban to all domestic and international flights by US carriers.
11. 2003ISO publishes ISO 7010, standardizing the no-smoking pictogram as P002.
12. 2010Unicode 6.0 adds 🚭 at codepoint U+1F6AD on October 11.

• •Aurigny Air Services in the Bailiwick of Guernsey was the first airline in the world to ban smoking entirely, in July 1977. A tiny regional carrier beat every major airline to the punch by two decades.
• •The 'no smoking' sign on US domestic flights was permanently lit on February 25, 1990. The control still exists in cockpits but has been functionally locked for 35 years.
• •Canada was the first country to ban smoking on all flights operated by its carriers, in 1994, three years before the European Union followed suit.
• •WHO's October 2025 tobacco report shows global smoking down from 26.2% (2010) to 19.5% (2024). Africa has the lowest prevalence at 9.5%, Europe the highest at 24.1%.
• •Tobacco use dropped by 120 million people globally since 2010, a 27% relative decline, even as population grew.
• •Under ISO 7010, the no-smoking pictogram is P002, the second-oldest standardized prohibition sign in the entire ISO safety catalogue. Only the general prohibition symbol is older.
• •Flight attendant Patty Young led the smoking-ban fight starting in 1966, a 22-year advocacy arc before the first US federal ban in 1988.

• •'This is Quitting' TikTok campaign: Truth Initiative's text-based program enrolled over 200,000 young people starting January 2019 and accumulated 1.4 billion views via #ThisIsQuitting. 🚭 is a common tag in the content.
• •Airline no-smoking sign: the permanent lighting of the 'no smoking' sign on US domestic flights on February 25, 1990 marked the end of an era. Every airline passenger born after 1990 has only ever known the sign as 'on by default.'
• •Ralph Nader's 1969 airline smoking-ban campaign: early consumer-advocacy work that 20 years later became federal law, a case-study example in tobacco policy history.

• •🚭 is codepoint U+1F6AD. Unicode name: NO SMOKING.
• •Common shortcodes: :no_smoking::no_smoking:, :smoke_free::smoke_free: on Discord, Slack, GitHub, Mastodon.
• •Pairs with 🫁 (lungs) and 🚬 (cigarette) in health-themed content; these ship separately in different Unicode versions.

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