Pleading Face Emoji

Big, glossy puppy-dog eyes with furrowed brows and a small frown. The face you make when you're begging for something, overwhelmed by something sweet, or trying to look irresistibly cute. Emojipedia crowned it "A New King" in 2020 after their analysis of 68 million tweets found it in 0.98% of all tweets, making it the third most-used emoji on Twitter behind only 😂 and 😭. What makes 🥺 unusual is how many completely different meanings it carries. It can be a sincere plea ("please 🥺"), an emotional reaction to something cute ("the puppy 🥺"), a flirty vulnerability ("miss you 🥺"), or, in LGBTQ+ internet culture, it became known as the "bottom emoji". In Japan, 🥺 is synonymous with the slang word "pien" (ぴえん), which was named Japan's 2020 Word of the Year by Sanseido. Its reign didn't last, though. By 2021, 🥺 had slipped from #3 to #14 in Unicode's global frequency rankings, and by 2024 it had fallen out of the top 10 entirely. A 2024 BecexTech study gave it an "extinction score" of 29, ranking it the 5th most over-popularized emoji. It's still widely understood, but the era where one in every hundred tweets contained 🥺 is over.

🥺 lives primarily on Twitter/X, TikTok, and in DMs. It's heavily Gen Z. The emoji's rise from obscurity to #3 on Twitter happened in under two years (mid-2018 to early 2020), which is remarkably fast for an emoji. The 🥺👉👈 combination (shy/bashful pose) became one of the most recognizable emoji combos on TikTok in 2020, boosted by a Lil Nas X tweet that got over 330,000 likes. In Japan, messaging app LINE found that 34.4% of Japanese teenagers used "pien" daily, making the emoji a cross-cultural phenomenon. At work, it reads as too vulnerable or cutesy for most professional settings.

🥺 is one of the more flirty emojis when used between people who are interested in each other. The vulnerability and puppy-dog eyes create a "soft" flirting style that's different from the bold approach of 😘 or 😍. Between friends, it's platonic. The flirty signal comes from the combination of vulnerability + directness ("miss you 🥺").

• •🥺 after a compliment from your crush? They're being cute and receptive. Good sign.
• •🥺👉👈 directed at you? That's the shy flirt combo. They're interested.
• •🥺 reacting to a pet photo in a group chat? Platonic cuteness, not flirting.
• •Repeated 🥺 in DMs? They want your attention and they're not being subtle about it.

🥺 arrived in Unicode 11.0 in 2018 as part of the same batch that gave us 🥰, 🥴 Woozy Face, and 🥳 Partying Face. While 🥰 won the 2019 World Emoji Award for Most Popular New Emoji, 🥺 overtook it on Twitter by April 2020. Emojipedia's analysis of 68 million tweets found 🥺 in nearly 1% of all tweets, calling it "A New King" and predicting it could challenge 😂 for the top spot. The emoji's design draws from the universal "puppy-dog eyes" expression, a term that dates to the early 1900s for the irresistible look children and animals give when begging. In Japan, it became intertwined with "pien" (ぴえん), an onomatopoeia for a soft crying sound that became one of the most used words among Japanese teens. Sanseido named it Japan's Word of the Year for 2020. LINE found 34.4% of teens used "pien" daily. The 2019 manga "Tomorrow I'll Be Someone's Girlfriend" helped fuel the trend further.

Approved in Unicode 11.0 (2018) as U+1F97AU+1F97A FACE WITH PLEADING EYES. Part of the same batch as 🥰, 🥴, and 🥳. Added to Emoji 11.0 in 2018.

• 🐕
  Kaminski 2019, PNAS: Anatomist Juliane Kaminski and colleagues [dissected dog and wolf heads](https://www.pnas.org/doi/10.1073/pnas.1820653116) and found that dogs have a specific facial muscle, the levator anguli oculi medialis (LAOM), which raises the inner eyebrow. Wolves don't. The muscle evolved during ~33,000 years of domestication, almost certainly because humans preferentially fed and bred the dogs whose faces could mimic the inner-brow lift humans associate with sadness.
• 🧬
  The two-minute test: When exposed to a human for two minutes, dogs raised their inner eyebrows significantly more than wolves did. The movement makes the eyes appear larger and the face more childlike, hijacking the same neural caregiving response that human infant faces trigger. The puppy-dog face is, anatomically, an evolved sales pitch.
• 📱
  Why 🥺 borrowed it: The Unicode design ([approved 2018, L2/16-308](https://www.unicode.org/L2/L2016/16308-emoji-recom.pdf)) explicitly references puppy-dog eyes: oversized glossy lower lids, raised inner brows. Apple, Google, and Samsung all converged on the same anatomical cue, which is why the emoji's effect is universal across platforms in a way fewer face emojis are. The 33,000-year selection pressure is doing the work; the emoji is just delivering it through six pixels.
• 🐱
  Coyotes can do it too (2024): A [follow-up study in Royal Society Open Science (2024)](https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC11444785/) found coyotes also have the LAOM muscle, complicating the 'dogs evolved it specifically for humans' story. The expression may be older than domestication, with humans simply selecting for dogs that already had it. Either way, 🥺 is leaning on a primate-level visual signal, not a Gen-Z one.
• 👦
  Shrek's Puss in Boots (2004): DreamWorks animator Conrad Vernon ran the puppy-dog-eyes gag in Shrek 2 (2004) explicitly because [it 'works on humans the way it works on dogs.'](https://www.pbs.org/wgbh/nova/article/puppy-dog-eyes/) The Puss-in-Boots eye-widen became a reference shorthand a decade before 🥺 shipped, which is why audiences read the emoji's meaning instantly when it landed in 2018. The cultural priming was already done.

1. 2018Approved in Unicode 11.0 as U+1F97A FACE WITH PLEADING EYES↗
2. 2019Starts climbing Twitter rapidly from August 2019. "Pien" trends in Japan.
3. 2020Emojipedia crowns it "A New King" after analyzing 68 million tweets. Found in 0.98% of all tweets.↗
4. 2020🥺👉👈 combo goes viral on TikTok. Lil Nas X's tweet with the combo gets 330K+ likes.↗
5. 2020Sanseido names "pien" (ぴえん, visually represented by 🥺) Japan's Word of the Year↗
6. 2021Slips from #3 to #14 in Unicode Consortium's global emoji frequency rankings↗
7. 2022🥹 (Face Holding Back Tears) arrives in Unicode 14.0, begins splitting the big-eyed emotional niche
8. 2023Discord rolls out Twemoji 14.1.2, redesigning the Pleading Face. Users launch a Change.org petition to bring the old version back↗
9. 2024Falls out of top 10 entirely. BecexTech study assigns an 'extinction score' of 29, ranking it the 5th most over-popularized emoji↗

In the English-speaking internet, 🥺 is primarily about pleading, cuteness, and vulnerability. In Japan, it maps directly to "pien" (ぴえん), an onomatopoeia for gentle crying that became one of the defining slang terms of 2019-2020. 34.4% of Japanese teens used it daily according to LINE data. The word spawned fashion trends ("pien" style), a horror game, and became embedded in manga and anime. In LGBTQ+ internet culture (particularly on Twitter), 🥺 took on the meaning of "bottom emoji", signaling submissiveness or passivity. This meaning has partially crossed into mainstream awareness.

• •Emojipedia analyzed 68 million tweets and found 🥺 in 0.98% of all tweets in April 2020, making it the #3 emoji on Twitter. They titled the analysis "A New King: Pleading Face."
• •In Japan, 🥺 is synonymous with "pien" (ぴえん), which Sanseido named the 2020 Word of the Year. LINE data showed 34.4% of Japanese teens used it daily.
• •The 🥺👉👈 combo became one of the most iconic emoji combinations on TikTok. Lil Nas X's tweet using it got over 330,000 likes.
• •🥺 is from the same Unicode 11.0 (2018) batch as 🥰, 🥴, and 🥳. While 🥰 won the 2019 Most Popular New Emoji award, 🥺 overtook it on Twitter by April 2020.
• •In LGBTQ+ internet culture, 🥺 is known as the "bottom emoji", signaling submissiveness. The Know Your Meme entry documents this extensively.
• •The emoji's design draws from "puppy-dog eyes," a term dating to the early 1900s for the irresistible look children and animals give when begging for something.
• •🥺 holds the record for the biggest single-year jump in Unicode Consortium frequency rankings: from #97 in 2019 to #3 in 2020, leaping 94 positions in a single year.
• •A 2024 BecexTech study gave 🥺 an "extinction score" of 29, ranking it the 5th most over-popularized emoji. Users called it "an overused way of asking for attention."
• •There's a Japanese horror game called PIEN (2020) by indie dev Tadasumen where the monster chasing you is literally the 🥺 emoji's face. A manga adaptation, Pien -Yellow Murder- by Oishi Romei, runs on the GANMA web comic platform. It's the only emoji to inspire a survival horror franchise.
• •"Pien" (ぴえん) is onomatopoeia derived from ぴいぴい (pii-pii), the Japanese sound for a baby crying. It started appearing on Japanese social media in late 2018, and the 2019 manga "Tomorrow I'll Be Someone's Girlfriend" helped cement it: the character Yua dressed in jirai (landmine) style and used pien constantly.
• •The Korean parallel is aegyo (애교), the cultural practice of acting cute to soften communication. K-pop's finger heart gesture popularized by Kim Hye-soo and Infinite's Nam Woohyun in 2011 eventually became 🫰 in Unicode 14.0. 🥺 plays the face-role that finger hearts play with the hands: a small, deliberate signal of soft vulnerability.

• •The "bottom emoji" connotation from LGBTQ+ culture has partially entered mainstream awareness. Someone unfamiliar with this usage might send 🥺 innocently, while the recipient reads it with sexual undertones.
• •Overusing 🥺 to ask for things can come across as emotionally manipulative rather than cute. The line between "adorable plea" and "guilt trip" depends on frequency and the relationship.
• •In some contexts, 🥺 reads as performative vulnerability rather than real emotion. If you're going through something serious, words work better than puppy eyes.

• •Emojipedia declared 🥺 "A New King" in April 2020 after analyzing 68 million tweets and finding it in nearly 1% of all tweets sampled. It rose from obscurity to the 3rd most-used emoji on Twitter in under two years, one of the fastest emoji adoption curves ever documented.
• •In March 2020, Twitter user @ayyy_vuh's tweet calling 🥺 "bottom speak" gained 323,900 likes and turned "the bottom emoji" into 🥺's permanent internet nickname. The association stuck so thoroughly that Know Your Meme's entry is literally titled "Pleading Emoji / Bottom Emoji."
• •The "🥺👉👈" combo (pleading face + two pointing fingers) became one of the most recognizable emoji sequences of 2020. It means "is for me?" or nervously asking for something. The combo spawned countless TikTok trends and became a meme format in its own right.
• •Puss in Boots' puppy-dog eyes in Shrek 2 (2004) are the pre-emoji version of 🥺. When the Puss in Boots: The Last Wish (2022) trailer dropped, fans immediately flooded comments with 🥺 and screenshots of the character's signature pleading look.
• •BuzzFeed, Cosmopolitan, and dozens of publications ran articles in 2020-2021 about "what does 🥺 mean when a guy/girl sends it" because search volume for the query exploded. It became one of the most-Googled emoji meanings during the pandemic era.
• •By 2024, the backlash had arrived. BecexTech's study ranked 🥺 as the 5th most over-popularized emoji, with users calling it "an overused way of asking for attention." Meanwhile, 😭 quietly took over as the internet's emotional face of choice -- Meltwater named it the #1 emoji of both 2024 and 2025, with 814 million social media mentions in 2025 alone.
• •PIEN (2020) is a Japanese first-person survival horror game built in Unreal Engine 4 where the antagonist is a weaponized version of the 🥺 emoji face. A comic adaptation, Pien -Yellow Murder- by Oishi Romei, runs on Japan's GANMA web comic platform. The game is often described as comedy dressed as horror, and it's the only known case of an emoji inspiring its own horror IP.

• •U+1F97AU+1F97A. Unicode 11.0 (2018). No variation selector needed.
• •On Slack: :pleading_face::pleading_face:. On GitHub: :pleading_face::pleading_face:. On Discord: :pleading_face::pleading_face:.
• •The emoji's rapid adoption curve (0 to 0.98% of all tweets in ~18 months) makes it a useful case study for emoji adoption analysis. If you're studying emoji trends, the Emojipedia analysis of 68 million tweets is the primary source.

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