Person With Veil Emoji

A person wearing a white wedding veil. Approved in Unicode 6.0 (2010) as U+1F470U+1F470, originally named "Bride with Veil." In Emoji 13.0 (2020), Unicode renamed it "Person with Veil" and added gendered variants 👰‍♀️ (woman with veil) and 👰‍♂️ (man with veil). The rename was one of the quieter inclusion updates of the decade, and arguably one of the most consequential.

Before 2020, emoji weddings defaulted to 👰 bride plus 🤵 groom. Same-sex wedding emojis didn't exist. You could either use 👫/👭/👬 (couples) or improvise. The 2020 release made every configuration possible: 👰‍♂️🤵‍♀️, 👰‍♀️👰‍♀️, 🤵‍♂️🤵‍♂️. No separate "same-sex wedding" emoji needed. The symmetry alone did the work.

Today 👰 tags wedding announcements, engagement posts, bridal showers, bachelorette parties, and the occasional fairy-tale reference. The gendered variants are now widely supported, though usage still skews toward 👰‍♀️ by a massive margin because the vast majority of western weddings still involve one or more bridal veils.

A seasonal spike emoji. Usage climbs from May through October (peak wedding season), with smaller peaks around Valentine's Day and New Year's Eve (proposal days). It's nearly inseparable from 💍, 💒, 🤵, and 🎂 in combos. Instagram wedding posts use it heavily. TikTok uses it less; there, wedding content skews toward specific audio and text overlays rather than emoji captions.

In LGBTQ+ contexts, 👰‍♂️ and 🤵‍♀️ appear in engagement announcements as quiet, non-lecture signals. The whole point of the 2020 update was that same-sex couples could announce a wedding with emojis without needing to explain, flag, or caption it.

👰 launched with Unicode 6.0 in 2010 as BRIDE WITH VEILBRIDE WITH VEIL. It was one of the most gendered emojis in the original Japanese-influenced carrier sets, and for a decade it was just that: a woman in a veil, full stop.

In Emoji 13.0 (2020), Unicode renamed it "Person with Veil" and shipped the ZWJ variants 👰‍♀️ and 👰‍♂️. The same release renamed 🤵 from "Man in Tuxedo" to "Person in Tuxedo" with matching ♀️/♂️ variants. That combination opened up every wedding pairing: 👰‍♂️🤵‍♀️ for a role-swapped wedding, 👰‍♀️👰‍♀️ or 🤵‍♂️🤵‍♂️ for same-sex weddings, all without Unicode needing to create a separate "same-sex wedding" emoji.

Emojipedia framed it as part of a broader inclusive push that year. The quiet symmetry did what adding a dedicated rainbow-wedding emoji would have done loudly. Now any couple's announcement emojis just work.

1. 2010Approved as `BRIDE WITH VEIL` in Unicode 6.0. All vendors render it as a woman in white.
2. 2015Skin tone modifiers added. 👰🏻 through 👰🏿 now possible.
3. 2020March: [Emoji 13.0](https://blog.emojipedia.org/117-new-emojis-in-final-list-for-2020/) renames the emoji to "Person with Veil" and ships 👰‍♀️ and 👰‍♂️ variants. Same release adds 🤵‍♀️ and 🤵‍♂️. By September, Apple iOS 14, Google Android 11, and Samsung One UI 2.5 all ship the new variants.
4. 2024Vendors refine the neutral base 👰 design to feel less implicitly female. Apple's rendering still reads feminine; Google's is more ambiguous.

• •The Roman flammeum was a flame-colored yellow wedding veil, not white. It was meant to make the bride look like a candle flame to ward off evil spirits. White veils became dominant only after Queen Victoria's 1840 wedding.
• •The blusher (short single layer worn over the face) traces to ancient superstitions about the groom being tricked by the bride's appearance. Lifting the blusher is the literal origin of the phrase "unveiling" a bride.
• •The global wedding industry is roughly $350 billion to $1.3 trillion USD per year, depending on which services count. The US alone hosts about 2.2 million weddings annually.
• •The 2020 rename from "Bride with Veil" to "Person with Veil" was one of the quietest inclusive updates in emoji history. No press release, no controversy, just 👰‍♂️ landing on Emoji 13.0 and suddenly enabling same-sex wedding announcements.
• •Kate Middleton's 2011 royal wedding veil revived cathedral-length styles for a decade. Retail bridal data tracked a measurable shift toward longer trains starting that year.
• •In Spanish and Italian Catholic tradition, the mantilla veil is worn behind the hairline halo-style and is never flipped forward as a blusher. Most emoji renderings default to the American fingertip-length veil instead.
• •Average US wedding cost jumped from $28,000 in 2022 to $30,500 in 2024. The average bridal gown alone is about $1,900, while grooms typically spend $300-$500 on attire.

• •Kate Middleton's 2011 royal wedding cathedral-length veil revived the long-train style for a decade. Vendor emoji designs around 2012-2014 started showing longer veils in response.
• •Princess Diana's 1981 25-foot ivory silk tulle veil remains the reference cathedral veil. Emoji depictions of brides trace a visual lineage back to that moment.
• •Netflix's Bridgerton (2020-2024) turned Regency-era veils into a bridal trend. Searches for "Bridgerton wedding" surged in 2021 and 2022 per Google Trends.
• •The simultaneous addition of 👰‍♂️ and 🤵‍♀️ in Emoji 13.0 (2020) made it possible to emoji-announce a same-sex wedding without captioning. LGBTQ+ news outlets covered it as a long-overdue fix.