Onion Emoji

A whole yellow-brown onion with papery skin and a dry root tuft at the base. 🧅 is the aromatic foundation emoji, but three cultural layers sit on top of the vegetable itself: tears from chopping, the Shrek "ogres have layers" meme, and The Onion, America's longest-running satirical newspaper. No other food emoji carries this much unrelated baggage.

The Unicode 12.0 proposal L2/18-077 was authored by Clint Adams and Jennifer 8. Lee of Emojination in 2018, the same pairing responsible for the dumpling, chopsticks, and takeout box. The Tor Project publicly campaigned for it on World Emoji Day 2018 because their branding is a literal purple onion, a nod to onion routing). Emojination got it through, and 🧅 shipped on March 5, 2019 alongside 🧄 garlic, 🧇 waffle, and 🦪 oyster.

The layers reading owes almost everything to Shrek (2001)): "Ogres are like onions. Layers. Onions have layers. Ogres have layers." Henrik Ibsen got there first with Peer Gynt peeling himself like an onion to discover no kernel of soul inside, and Roland Barthes used the onion against the apricot as a semiotic image of texts without a center. But Shrek is the reference every texter is channeling, whether they know it or not.

🧅 lives in three communities that barely overlap.

Cooking and recipe creators. This is the heaviest-rotation use. Food TikTok, Reels, and Instagram carousels open with 🧅 as the universal first ingredient. "Start with 🧅 🧄 and olive oil" is the most-typed recipe opener on the internet. The mirepoix, soffritto, and Cajun holy trinity) all start with an onion, and food-content captions treat 🧅🧄🫑 as interchangeable shorthand for "flavor base incoming." Outback Steakhouse's Bloomin' Onion, created in 1988 and now sold 8 million times a year, gets its own 🧅🌸 visual joke in food promos.

The emotional-dodge crowd. "I'm not crying, someone's cutting 🧅" is so common it's become a reflex response to any heartwarming video. It arrived on Twitter around 2013 as a verbal tic and snapped onto the emoji the moment 🧅 shipped in 2019. TikTok analytics firms tracked a 210% jump in metaphorical onion-emoji usage between 2022 and 2024 as the format spread to Instagram Reels and YouTube comments.

The layers crowd. "🧅 have layers" is a Shrek reference compressed into three characters. It shows up under therapy content, character-analysis threads, and any "you're more complex than you look" compliment. The format mutates easily: "people 🧅," "this drama has layers 🧅," "emotional support 🧅." The Tor/privacy crowd also uses 🧅 to signal .onion links), usually alongside 💻 or 🕸️.

One register to know about: in US drug slang, "onion" can mean an ounce. It's niche, it's context-heavy, and it's the reason "got the 🧅" reads differently in different group chats.

The onion is one of the oldest cultivated vegetables on earth and arguably the only one that has brought down governments.

Ancient Egypt worshipped it. Onions appear on altars, on tomb walls, and in mummies. King Ramses IV was entombed with onions in his eye sockets. Egyptian priests saw the concentric rings as a symbol of eternal life. Herodotus reports that the workers who built the Great Pyramid lived on radishes, onions, and garlic, and that the inscription on Khufu's pyramid recorded exactly how much silver had been spent feeding them.

It has collapsed Indian governments. In 1980 the central government fell partly because onion prices spiked. In 1998 the BJP lost Delhi after prices jumped from Rs 9 to Rs 50 per kilo in weeks. In 2019 prices climbed 253% in four months, the worst spike in a decade. Political scientists in India literally track onion prices as a stability indicator. No other vegetable is a voting issue.

The emoji arrived because activists pushed. Clint Adams and Jennifer 8. Lee submitted proposal L2/18-077 in 2018. The Tor Project publicly cheered it on because their logo uses an onion in place of the letter O. Unicode approved it that September, vendors shipped it in spring 2019, and by autumn it was showing up in cooking content and Shrek memes simultaneously.

Shrek fixed the layers meaning for a generation. The "ogres are like onions" scene in the 2001 film is one of the most-quoted moments in animated cinema. Donkey argues for parfaits or cake. Shrek holds the line on onions. The exchange was written by Ted Elliott and Terry Rossio, not ad-libbed, and Mike Myers delivered it with the weary frustration of a man who has given this speech before. The line stuck because it worked as a character beat, a metaphor for prejudice, and a self-contained joke all at once.

1. 2018Emojination submits proposal L2/18-077 authored by Clint Adams and Jennifer 8. Lee
2. 2018Tor Project publicly campaigns for the emoji on World Emoji Day
3. 2019Approved in Unicode 12.0 on March 5, shipped alongside 🧄 garlic, 🧇 waffle, 🦪 oyster
4. 2019Apple, Google, Samsung, WhatsApp all ship their onion designs within weeks
5. 2019India onion crisis sends prices up 253%, emoji becomes political shorthand in South Asian social media
6. 2021"Who's cutting onions" format snaps onto the emoji as its default meme use
7. 2022Metaphorical use on Twitter climbs 210% over two years per third-party analytics
8. 2024The Onion sold to Global Tetrahedron, InfoWars auction bid briefly revives satirical relevance

• •Ancient Egyptians worshipped onions as a symbol of eternal life because of their concentric rings. Onions have been found in the eye sockets of mummies, including King Ramses IV. Egyptian priests carried bundles of onion leaves during ceremonies.
• •Herodotus wrote that an inscription on the Great Pyramid recorded how much silver was spent on radishes, onions, and garlic for the workforce: sixteen hundred talents of silver over twenty years.
• •Onions make you cry because cutting cells releases syn-propanethial-S-oxide, a volatile sulfur compound. Chilling the onion slows the enzyme that produces it. A sharp knife helps because it crushes fewer cells.
• •The Onion newspaper was founded in 1988 by two University of Wisconsin–Madison students who were so broke they ate onion sandwiches while brainstorming. Christopher Johnson's uncle suggested the name.
• •The Bloomin' Onion was created by Outback Steakhouse co-founder Tim Gannon in 1988 after seeing Japanese cookbook photos of intricately cut vegetables. Outback consults with an "onion-ologist" at Texas A&M to breed onions that hold shape after blooming.
• •India grew 31 million metric tons of onions in 2024, the most in the world. Combined with China's 26 million tons, just two countries produce half of all onions consumed on earth.
• •The Tor Project publicly campaigned for the onion emoji because their branding is a purple onion. Their network routes traffic through multiple encrypted layers, hence the name The Onion Router.
• •Indian state and central governments have fallen over onion prices three times in the last 45 years. Political strategists in Delhi track onion prices like financial analysts track the S&P 500.
• •Some sources claim the Shrek onion-layers line was ad-libbed by Mike Myers, but the scene was scripted by screenwriters Ted Elliott and Terry Rossio. The ad-lib story is itself an Onion-worthy piece of misinformation.

• •Shrek (2001): "Ogres are like onions. Layers." Written by Ted Elliott and Terry Rossio, voiced by Mike Myers. Donkey counters with parfaits and cakes. Shrek insists on onions. The single biggest driver of the layers association.
• •The Onion satirical newspaper, founded August 29, 1988 at the University of Wisconsin–Madison by Tim Keck and Christopher Johnson, reportedly named after the onion sandwiches the broke founders ate while brainstorming.
• •Tor Project logo: Tor stands for The Onion Router. Its purple-onion logo predates the emoji by 15 years. The Tor Project was one of the loudest organized voices pushing Unicode for 🧅 inclusion in 2018.
• •Bloomin' Onion (1988) by Outback co-founder Tim Gannon, inspired by Japanese cookbook photos of decorative vegetable cuts. Outback still sells roughly 8 million a year. The signature emoji pairing is 🧅🌸.
• •Ibsen's Peer Gynt (1867) has Peer peel himself like an onion and find no kernel, revealing he is not truly human. Roland Barthes later used the onion against the apricot as an image of meaning without a center.