Person Getting Massage Emoji

A person receiving a massage, with closed eyes, a calm face, and two hands on the scalp or temples. 💆 is the gender-neutral base of the massage trio, sitting between 💆‍♀️ woman getting massage and 💆‍♂️ man getting massage as the default when the sender doesn't want to specify a gender at all. Approved in Unicode 6.0 (2010) as U+1F486U+1F486.

It was originally named "Face Massage" when it landed. Early designs from Google and Microsoft took that literally, with hands rubbing the cheeks like a spa facial. Apple shipped a head massage instead, and by the late 2010s, almost every vendor had followed Apple's lead. The codepoint name was quietly updated to "Person Getting Massage" but Graphemica still lists "face massage" as the alias and some shortcodes (:face_massage::face_massage:) never caught up.

In everyday messaging, 💆 means one of three things: you're actually at a spa, you're at home doing a skincare or self-care routine, or you're texting someone to say your brain is fried and you need a break. The third use has quietly become the most common. The American Massage Therapy Association's 2025 survey found that 30% of people who booked a massage in the past year said the primary reason was stress, and 26% cited mental health specifically. 💆 tracks that shift. Less "my traps hurt," more "I am running on fumes."

The neutral 💆 has a particular niche. When a brand, a workplace account, or anyone who wants to avoid gendering their audience posts about self-care, this is the emoji they reach for. It shows up in HR messaging about mental health days, in app push notifications ("time for a break 💆"), and in the "wellness Slack channel" of every remote company that has one.

On TikTok and Instagram, users default to the gendered variants more often in personal posts, but creators with mixed audiences (especially in the men's grooming space) lean on 💆 specifically because it doesn't assume anything about who's watching. Men's massage usage is higher than women's: 23% of men got a professional massage in the past year versus 19% of women, a gap that most people don't expect. That stat alone is why the neutral emoji still earns its place.

In workplace tools, 💆 has become the unofficial status emoji for "taking a mental health moment." A University of Michigan study found that employees who used emojis in remote communication were less likely to disengage, and wellness emojis are among the safest choices because they signal a need without oversharing. Setting your Slack status to 💆 reads less dramatic than "I'm burned out" and less performative than "recharging."

The other big use is stress signaling with no intent of booking anything. Drop 💆 after a long workday and most people read it as "I wish," not "I just booked a 90-minute deep tissue." The gap between the emoji and the actual appointment is usually months.

💆 was approved in Unicode 6.0 in October 2010 under the name "Face Massage." It came out of the Japanese carrier sets (KDDI, SoftBank, DoCoMo) where beauty and grooming emojis were common, reflecting how normal face massage appointments are inside Japanese salon culture. The original design intent was literal: a spa facial with hands on the cheeks.

Apple reinterpreted it. Their design showed hands on the temples with the eyes closed, which read more like a scalp treatment or tension relief than a facial. That version became the reference design. Google's redesign in 2017 moved away from the face-rubbing pose and matched Apple's head massage framing. Microsoft and Samsung followed. By the time the late-2010s gender-neutral push shipped across major platforms, most vendors had already converged on the head massage design and a gender-ambiguous person.

The gendered variants 💆‍♀️ and 💆‍♂️ were introduced as ZWJ sequences in Emoji 4.0 (2016), during the same release that added gender options to most activity emojis. Before that, the base 💆 defaulted to a woman's design on most keyboards, which meant sending it already implied gender whether the sender wanted to or not. The neutral base exists as a default, but on most platforms today it renders with short hair and a neutral face, finally matching the "person" in its name.

1. 2010Approved in Unicode 6.0 as "Face Massage." Google and Microsoft ship designs with hands on the cheeks, matching the literal name.↗
2. 2015Added to Emoji 1.0. Apple's head massage interpretation (hands on temples, closed eyes) becomes the de facto template.
3. 2016Gendered variants 💆‍♀️ and 💆‍♂️ added as ZWJ sequences in Emoji 4.0. Base 💆 still renders as female on most platforms.
4. 2017Google redesigns from face massage to head massage, converging on Apple's framing.↗
5. 2019Gender-neutral design push across vendors. Base 💆 starts rendering with ambiguous hair and neutral features on newer platforms.↗
6. 2020Samsung's One UI 2.5 ships a softer, more realistic massage design.
7. 2024Most vendor designs now render 💆 as a clearly gender-neutral person with short hair, closed eyes, and hands on the temples.

For most of the 2010s, 💆 rendered as a woman on Apple, Google, and Samsung, even though the codepoint was genderless. The 💆‍♀️ and 💆‍♂️ ZWJ variants were added in Emoji 4.0 (2016) to give each gender an explicit version, which meant the base 💆 could finally drift toward a neutral design. Post-2019, most vendors redesigned it with short hair and a neutral face. That shift mattered: men actually get massages more often than women (23% vs 19% of US adults in the past year per the AMTA), but the emoji visually told a different story for a decade.

• •Americans spend roughly $30 billion a year on massage therapy, supported by about 396,293 licensed massage and hydromassage therapists nationwide. 💆 covers a surprisingly large chunk of the US economy.
• •The US Bureau of Labor Statistics projects massage therapist employment to grow 15% from 2024 to 2034, faster than almost every other occupation. Mental health demand, not injury recovery, drives most of the growth.
• •About 12% of US employers now offer workplace massage as an employee benefit, almost always paired with other wellness programs. The chair massage at the company retreat is literally a job perk category now.
• •Unicode originally named this emoji "Face Massage." Early Google and Microsoft designs showed hands on the cheeks exactly like that. Apple's head massage interpretation took over, and the rename followed the redesign.
• •The 2022 National Health Interview Survey found 11.1% of US adults saw a massage therapist in the past year. 💆 represents a real 30+ million person habit, not just an emoji mood.
• •#SelfCareSunday has over 1 billion views on TikTok and 💆 is one of the most common emojis in the caption set, alongside ✨ and 🫧.

• •💆 is codepoint U+1F486U+1F486 and supports skin tone modifiers: U+1F486 U+1F3FBU+1F486 U+1F3FB through U+1F486 U+1F3FFU+1F486 U+1F3FF. No ZWJ needed for the base.
• •Gendered variants are ZWJ sequences: U+1F486 U+200D U+2640 U+FE0FU+1F486 U+200D U+2640 U+FE0F for 💆‍♀️ and U+1F486 U+200D U+2642 U+FE0FU+1F486 U+200D U+2642 U+FE0F for 💆‍♂️.
• •The CLDR name is person getting massageperson getting massage. Some older systems still use face_massageface_massage as the shortcode, including some emoji alias lists. Support both in search and autocomplete if you're building a picker.
• •Screen readers announce this variably: "person getting massage" on newer assistive tech, "face massage" on older ones. That inconsistency traces directly to the Unicode rename.

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