Restroom Emoji

🚻 is the restroom sign: a blue square with both male and female stick figures, used on buildings around the world to mark the toilets. It's the catch-all version, the sign used when there's one facility for everyone or when the writer doesn't want to specify a gender. In texting, it reads as "I'm going to the bathroom" or "where's the bathroom" without having to type the word.

The emoji sits between the gendered siblings 🚹 and 🚺. Emojipedia notes it's most commonly read as "unisex" or "shared," which is also what real-world 🚻 signs usually mean. In the last decade it's picked up another layer: since the 2016 bathroom-bill fights in North Carolina and the California AB 1732 all-gender-toilet law, the combined-figure 🚻 often stands in as shorthand for the broader "any gender welcome" conversation.

It's a low-drama emoji compared to the gendered versions. Almost never flirty, almost never sexual, almost never a meme. It's practical, functional, and disappears into the message.

🚻 shows up in three places: facilities wayfinding, real-life directions ("take a left at the 🚻"), and the bathroom-bill discourse on X and Threads.

On Instagram and TikTok it's rarely a main-character emoji. It appears in travel captions where people photograph signage, or in parent-group posts about finding a changing table. On Reddit threads about transgender rights and public facilities, 🚻 is the de facto "inclusive bathroom" tag, usually contrasted against a pair of 🚹🚺 signs to represent the old segregated model.

Businesses that remodel single-stall toilets as all-gender use 🚻 in their social announcements. Airports promoting family restrooms do the same. The emoji reads clean in professional contexts where 🚹 or 🚺 might feel too pointed.

The combined male-plus-female restroom sign comes from two 1970s design efforts that cross-pollinated each other. Otl Aicher's 1972 Munich Olympics pictogram system reduced every sport and wayfinding icon to a consistent stick-figure grammar. Two years later, Roger Cook and Don Shanosky's AIGA/DOT set (1974) turned that grammar into 34 copyright-free pictograms for the US Department of Transportation, including men's, women's, and combined restroom signs.

The combined version was the quiet compromise sign for buildings with shared or family facilities. It showed up in airports, parks, highway rest stops, and small businesses that only had one toilet. For fifty years it sat in the background.

The emoji was approved as part of Unicode 6.0 in October 2010, part of the same airport-signage batch that gave us 🚹, 🚺, 🚾, 🛂, and 🛄. Codepoint U+1F6BBU+1F6BB. Shortcode :restroom::restroom:. All vendors draw it blue, and none have attempted a redesign, which fits a sign that's supposed to mean exactly the same thing everywhere.

In the US and Canada, 🚻 most often reads as "unisex" or "all-gender." In Europe, it's more literally "toilets for everyone" without the political charge. Scandinavia and the Netherlands have been using 🚻-style signs on most public toilets for decades without it being news.

Japan is the outlier. Japanese toilets are almost universally gendered, color-coded (blue for men, red or pink for women), and often accompanied by the kanji 男 and 女. The combined 🚻 sign is used mainly in airports, Shinkansen stations, and department stores that cater to foreigners, which is why Japanese Twitter sometimes uses it as a tourist-coded signal.

China, Singapore, and South Korea have adopted the combined sign widely in new buildings. In India, large airports use 🚻 but most roadside and local facilities don't, because the cultural default is strongly gendered and women's-only spaces are a practical safety concern.

• •The earliest gender-separated public toilets on record are from a 1739 Parisian ball. Before then, public facilities were essentially male-only.
• •Massachusetts passed the first US law requiring separate workplace restrooms for women in 1887. By the 1920s, segregated workplace bathrooms were standard across the country.
• •Most countries use combined-figure signs for family, accessible, and single-stall bathrooms, while still having 🚹 and 🚺 for multi-stall facilities. 🚻 is the flexible sibling.
• •North Carolina's HB2 bathroom bill cost the state an estimated $3.76 billion in lost business, event cancellations, and missed expansions before being partly repealed in 2017.
• •Airports in Helsinki, Copenhagen, Amsterdam, and Tokyo Narita have the highest share of 🚻-style combined-figure signage in the world, often 60% or more of all toilet signs.
• •The emoji is sometimes misread as "couple" or "relationship" emoji in non-English contexts because the two stick figures look like a dating-icon pair. Unicode was firm: it's a bathroom sign.
• •California's AB 1732 made it illegal to enforce gender on single-stall restrooms. The law has been copied by Illinois, New Mexico, Vermont, and several cities.

• •Codepoint: U+1F6BBU+1F6BB. Single codepoint, no variation selector.
• •Shortcodes: :restroom::restroom: on GitHub, Slack, and Discord. Also :toilet::toilet: on some platforms but that maps to 🚽.
• •Part of the Transport and Map Symbols block alongside U+1F6B9U+1F6B9 (🚹), U+1F6BAU+1F6BA (🚺), and U+1F6BEU+1F6BE (🚾). The four form a natural signage cluster.
• •Screen readers announce it as "restroom" or "restroom sign." For accessibility UIs meant to promote all-gender facilities, pair with a text label.

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