Person Getting Haircut Emoji

A person sitting for a haircut, with visible scissors above the head and an invisible stylist doing the work. 💇 is the gender-neutral base of the haircut trio, with 💇‍♀️ woman getting haircut and 💇‍♂️ man getting haircut as the explicit ZWJ variants. Approved in Unicode 6.0 (2010) as U+1F487U+1F487 under the name "Haircut."

For years, this emoji had an identity crisis across platforms. Apple and Google shipped a seated figure with scissors hovering above the head. Microsoft shipped a comb and scissors with no person at all, which was technically the grooming-tool emoji wearing the wrong codepoint. That Windows design lasted from 2012 well into the late 2010s before Microsoft finally ported a person-shaped design in line with everyone else. If someone on a vintage Windows device ever sent you a comb-and-scissors, they were actually sending 💇.

In texting, 💇 does three jobs. First, the literal one: "at the barber 💇" or "salon day 💇." Second, the glow-up: a fresh cut as a stand-in for any visible personal transformation. Third, the emotional one: hair is the cheapest lever for self-reinvention, which is why the post-breakup haircut is a documented archetype. A 2023 survey found 61% of people cut their hair after a breakup, and 💇 is the emoji that carries that entire emotional beat without needing words.

On TikTok, 💇 sits at the center of the largest grooming content universe on the internet. #barber has over 102 billion views and #barbershop adds another 4.5 billion. Barbers have become social media celebrities with millions of followers, and the before-and-after haircut reveal is one of the platform's most reliable viral formats. Messy hair to clean fade in 15 seconds is satisfying content, and 💇 is the caption that anchors it.

The gender-neutral 💇 is preferred by brands, salons, and creators with mixed audiences. Barbershops and hair product brands default to 💇 in marketing captions because it doesn't assume the customer is male or female. Personal posts lean harder on the gendered variants: 💇‍♂️ for the fade selfie, 💇‍♀️ for the balayage reveal.

The spending split between genders is inverted from what most people guess. Men actually go to the barbershop more frequently than women (5.84 visits a year vs 3.81), but women spend more than twice as much per trip ($54.34 vs $22.93). Only 40% of the average women's salon spend is actually for haircuts; the rest goes to coloring, blowouts, and treatments. 💇 captions both visits, but the services underneath are wildly different.

In texting, 💇 tends to be a heads-up emoji. "Running late, barber went long 💇" or "at the salon, call you after 💇." It's rarely flirty on its own. When someone posts a fresh-cut selfie, the socially correct response is an immediate compliment.

💇 was approved in Unicode 6.0 in 2010 under the name "Haircut." It came out of the Japanese carrier emoji sets, where salon and grooming emojis were well-represented because beauty-related texting was a major use case on early Japanese mobile networks. The original design intent was a seated figure with scissors above the head.

Apple's first rendering set the visual standard: a person with a half-visible body, hair visible, and an isolated pair of scissors suspended above. Google matched it. Microsoft went a different direction entirely and shipped a simple comb-and-scissors pair with no person at all. That decision is wild in retrospect because it effectively turned 💇 into a "barber tools" emoji on Windows, and messages rendered entirely differently across platforms for most of the 2010s. Microsoft eventually redesigned to a person figure matching the rest of the industry.

The gendered variants 💇‍♀️ and 💇‍♂️ were added in Emoji 4.0 (2016), during the same release that gave nearly every activity emoji explicit gender options. Before that, the base 💇 rendered as a woman on most platforms, which made the emoji less useful for the booming barbershop content economy. The male variant specifically gave barbershop culture, fade cuts, and the entire men's grooming industry its own dedicated emoji.

1. 2010Approved in Unicode 6.0 as "Haircut." Most vendors ship a seated figure with scissors above the head.↗
2. 2012Microsoft ships a comb-and-scissors design on Windows, no person visible. This version persists for most of the decade.
3. 2015Added to Emoji 1.0.
4. 2016Gendered variants 💇‍♀️ and 💇‍♂️ added as ZWJ sequences in Emoji 4.0.↗
5. 2018Microsoft redesigns to include an actual person, finally aligning with Apple and Google's interpretation.
6. 2019Gender-neutral push across vendors. Base 💇 drifts toward ambiguous features.
7. 2023Most major vendor designs now show a person in a salon chair, regardless of gender cues, with scissors above.

For most of the 2010s, 💇 rendered as a woman on Apple and Google, even though the codepoint is gender-neutral. Microsoft sidestepped the whole issue with a comb-and-scissors design that had no person at all. The 💇‍♀️ and 💇‍♂️ ZWJ variants landed in Emoji 4.0 (2016), and the male variant specifically unlocked the barbershop content economy on social media. The base 💇 drifted to neutral hair and ambiguous features around 2019. Men actually visit salons and barbershops more often than women (5.84 vs 3.81 times per year per the spending study), but women spend over twice as much per trip. Neither side of that gap was reflected in the original female-default design.

• •The US hair salon industry is worth about $60 billion a year, with 1.05 million hair salons operating across the country. 💇 caption rate on scheduled TikTok content is disproportionately high for the industry's actual revenue share.
• •Women's salon spending splits roughly 40% on haircuts and 60% on other services: color, treatments, and blowouts. Men's spending is almost entirely the cut. Same emoji, very different transactions.
• •Windows 8's original 💇 design was just a comb and scissors, no person at all. For years, cross-platform messages meant two people could see completely different pictures for the same codepoint.
• •Around 46% of salon bookings happen when the salon is closed, which is why online booking dominates the industry. Clients book at midnight and send 💇 the next morning.
• •Men's average time between haircuts in the US is about 3.8 weeks according to stylists and 5.1 weeks according to men. The discrepancy is that barbers notice when men are overdue and men don't.
• •Post-breakup haircuts aren't just cultural shorthand. Research on identity reconstruction shows changing appearance creates new self-perception in the brain. The emotional reset is real.

• •💇 is codepoint U+1F487U+1F487 and supports skin tone modifiers: U+1F487 U+1F3FBU+1F487 U+1F3FB through U+1F487 U+1F3FFU+1F487 U+1F3FF. No ZWJ needed for the base.
• •Gendered variants are ZWJ sequences: U+1F487 U+200D U+2640 U+FE0FU+1F487 U+200D U+2640 U+FE0F for 💇‍♀️ and U+1F487 U+200D U+2642 U+FE0FU+1F487 U+200D U+2642 U+FE0F for 💇‍♂️.
• •The CLDR name is person getting haircutperson getting haircut. Shortcodes vary: :haircut::haircut:, :person_getting_haircut::person_getting_haircut:. Older systems might still use :haircut::haircut: without disambiguation.
• •If you're building anything that renders emoji screenshots from multiple vintages, remember Microsoft shipped a comb-and-scissors design for 💇 until roughly 2018. Fallback handling for older systems should account for the no-person variant.

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