Partying Face Emoji

A yellow face in full party mode: party hat on, blowing a paper horn, confetti flying everywhere. 🥳 is the emoji version of walking into a room and immediately being the loudest person at the celebration. It works for birthdays, New Year's, graduations, work wins, and any moment where "congratulations" needs an exclamation point. Unlike its close cousin 🎉, which represents the event (the party popper), 🥳 represents the feeling — you're the one wearing the hat and making noise. It ranks around #30 in global emoji popularity, and usage has climbed steadily since its 2018 debut, with predictable spikes every December and January.

On Instagram and TikTok, 🥳 is standard in birthday posts, milestone captions, and "we did it" stories. It's the face that goes with 🎂 in almost every birthday comment. On Slack and Teams, it's become a common reaction emoji for promotions, launches, and team wins — less formal than 🎉, more personal. On Twitter/X, it shows up in quote tweets celebrating good news or in sarcastic contexts when something decidedly un-celebratory happens ("rent went up again 🥳"). Gen Z uses it both sincerely and ironically, which makes it one of those emojis where context decides everything.

• 💬
  58%: of surveyed employees say workplace emoji let them say more with fewer words. ([Slack, 2024](https://slack.com/blog/collaboration/emoji-use-at-work))
• 🌐
  66% / 60%: of Indian and Chinese respondents say their company has its own internal emoji language, the highest in the global survey.
• 🪩
  Duolingo dance shortcut: Maintains a custom "dance party" Slack shortcut that auto-replies with every dancing custom emoji at once. The platform-native version of stacked 🥳s, and a fixture in [Zapier's roundup](https://zapier.com/blog/useful-work-emoji/) of useful work emoji.
• 🤐
  The reaction tax: Anthropologists call this kind of expressive obligation a phatic ritual. On Slack, opting out of the 🥳 reaction in #wins reads louder than the reaction itself, which is why the sarcastic register exists in the first place.

Before 🥳 existed, people had to express party excitement with object emojis: 🎉🎊🎈. There was no face that said "I am literally at the party." The Unicode Consortium received a proposal (L2/17-244) in 2017 for a "Face with Party Horn and Party Hat" to fill this gap. The emoji was approved in Unicode 11.0 and released on May 21, 2018.

The design arrived fully formed: yellow face, conical party hat, paper blowout horn, confetti in the air. Every major platform rendered it as unmistakably festive from day one. Apple gave it a blue and white striped hat. Google went with a polka-dot hat and a slightly unhinged grin. Samsung opted for a purple hat.

🥳 caught on fast. Within a year of release, it was showing up in birthday messages, New Year's posts, and graduation captions at rates that rivaled 🎉, which had a six-year head start. The reason was simple: people wanted a face, not an object. 🎉 says "here's a party." 🥳 says "I'm at the party." That first-person perspective made it sticky.

Approved in Unicode 11.0 (2018) as U+1F973U+1F973 FACE WITH PARTY HORN AND PARTY HAT. Added to Emoji 11.0. Part of the Smileys & Emotion category, specifically the face-hat subcategory. CLDR short name: "partying face." Keywords: celebration, hat, horn, party.

• 🥳
  Partying face: Carved off the "I am at the party" use case from 🎉 (party popper). 🎉 stayed strong as the event-marker; 🥳 took the personal-celebration register.
• 🥰
  Smiling face with hearts: Carved off "adoring" from 😍. 😍 still does romantic attraction; 🥰 took warmth-toward-pets, hugs, and grandparents.
• 🤩
  Star-struck: Carved off "impressed" from 😮 / 😍. The starry eyes specialized into admiration of an event or person, not a thing.
• 🥺
  Pleading face: Carved off "please" from 🙏 (folded hands). 🥺 took the soft-asking register. By 2020 it had its own [TikTok aesthetic](https://www.tiktok.com/discover/pleading-face-emoji).
• 🥶
  Cold face: Carved off "freezing" from 🤧 / 🤒. Specifically the temperature complaint, not illness.
• 🥵
  Hot face: Carved off "too hot" from generic-sweat 😅. Quickly hijacked into thirst-trap caption duty.
Show all 10 (4 more)

1. 2017Proposal L2/17-244 submitted to Unicode Consortium for "Face with Party Horn and Party Hat"
2. 2018Approved in Unicode 11.0, released May 21, 2018 as U+1F973↗
3. 2019Rapid adoption across iOS, Android, and web platforms — quickly becomes a birthday staple
4. 2020COVID lockdowns turn 🥳 into the symbol of virtual birthday celebrations — Google searches for "birthday emoji" spike 45%
5. 2021Popularity converges with 🎉 for birthday-related messages
6. 2023Gen Z repurposes 🥳 as a sarcasm tool — "rent went up 🥳" becomes a recognizable meme format on Twitter and TikTok

🥳 is one of the less culturally ambiguous emojis. A party hat and noisemaker read as "celebration" almost everywhere. The main variable is formality: in some East Asian work cultures, sending a face emoji to a superior feels too casual, so 🎉 (an object) is preferred for professional congratulations. In Latin American WhatsApp groups, 🥳 gets paired with longer emoji sequences for birthdays — often 5-10 emojis deep. In Western Europe and North America, it's common in both personal and workplace contexts without much formality concern.

• 🍎
  Apple: Blue and white striped conical hat. Closed-eye smile reused from 😚. Soft, aspirational reads more 'birthday card' than 'New Year's Eve'.
• 🤖
  Google (Noto): Polka-dot hat, wider grin with tongue and slight squint. Reads chaotic and playful, the version that lands hardest in sarcastic Reddit replies.
• 📱
  Samsung: Purple hat with a confetti pattern. Eyes more open than Apple's, the most 'genuinely surprised' reading of the four.
• 🪟
  Microsoft (Fluent): Striped paper-cone hat with star confetti. Slightly more formal-feeling, which is part of why Teams users gravitate to 🎉 over 🥳 for exec-channel reactions.

• •🥳 was part of Unicode 11.0 in 2018, which also introduced 🥶 Cold Face, 🥵 Hot Face, and 🧐 Face with Monocle. It was a strong class of face emojis.
• •The official Unicode name is "Face with Party Horn and Party Hat." The short name "partying face" was added by CLDR (Common Locale Data Repository) because nobody was going to type the full name.
• •Apple's 🥳 design has a blue and white striped party hat. Google gives it a polka-dot hat and a wider grin. Samsung uses a purple hat. The horn and confetti are consistent across all platforms.
• •Usage data shows 🥳 spikes every December and January as people ring in the new year, then spikes again in birthday-heavy months.
• •🥳 overtook 🎊 (confetti ball) in usage within its first year of existence. It took three years to close most of the gap with 🎉 (party popper), which had a six-year head start.
• •Google Trends shows that people search for "birthday emoji" roughly 60% more often than "party emoji." Birthdays aren't seasonal — someone's always turning a year older, and they always need the right emoji for the group chat.
• •🥳 is one of only three emojis in the "face-hat" subcategory of Smileys & Emotion. The other two are 🤠 (cowboy) and 🥸 (disguised face). It's a small, exclusive club.
• •Every face emoji in the Unicode 11.0 cohort (🥳, 🥰, 🤩, 🥺, 🥶, 🥵, 🤯, 🤪, 🥴, 🧐) carved off a slice of an older emoji's territory rather than displacing it. It was a specialization release, not a replacement release, which is why 🎉 and 😍 are still on the all-time top-100 next to their carved-off successors.
• •Apple's 🥳 reuses the same closed-eye smile as 😚 (kissing face with closed eyes). It's a clue about how Apple builds emoji sets: shared rigs, swapped accessories.

• •Sending 🥳 after someone shares bad news. Unless you're clearly being sarcastic, it reads as tone-deaf. The party hat and horn make it impossible to read as sympathetic.
• •Using 🥳 in a professional email to someone who doesn't use emojis. In casual Slack channels it's fine. In a client email, it can read as unprofessional depending on the industry.
• •Stacking multiple 🥳 (like "🥳🥳🥳🥳🥳") — one or two conveys celebration. Five or more starts looking like spam or a keyboard malfunction.

• •During the 2020 lockdowns, "happy quarantine birthday 🥳" became such a common Instagram caption genre that multiple publications wrote trend pieces about virtual birthday celebrations.
• •Apple's marketing materials frequently feature 🥳 in birthday-related iMessage promotions and Memoji demonstrations.
• •The emoji is a staple in TikTok birthday reveal videos, where creators surprise friends or family members with party setups and caption the video with 🥳.
• •Slack's 2025 blog post on emoji culture at work specifically called out 🥳 as one of the emojis that's reshaped how teams celebrate wins asynchronously — replacing the awkward "congrats!" message with a single reaction.

• •U+1F973U+1F973. No variation selector needed. Renders consistently across modern platforms.
• •On Slack: :partying_face::partying_face:. On GitHub: :partying_face::partying_face:. On Discord: :partying_face::partying_face:. The shortcode is consistent.
• •If you're building birthday reminder bots or celebration features, 🥳 is the go-to face emoji. Pair it with 🎂 for birthdays or 🎉 for general celebration.
• •The emoji was added in 2018, so older systems (pre-iOS 12.1, pre-Android 9.0) may not render it. Display a fallback or use 🎉 for maximum compatibility.

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