Rightwards Hand Emoji

The rightwards hand emoji shows an open right hand extending to the right, back of the hand facing the viewer. It's part of a four-emoji directional hand set (🫱🫲🫳🫴) added in Unicode 14.0, and its origin story is more interesting than its appearance suggests.

This emoji wasn't designed to be used on its own. Jennifer Daniel, Google's creative director for emoji and chair of the Unicode Emoji Subcommittee, proposed it in November 2019 as infrastructure for a bigger goal: making the 🤝 handshake emoji support multiple skin tones. The existing handshake couldn't have different skin tones on each hand because both hands were part of a single character. The solution? Create separate left and right hand emojis (🫱 and 🫲) that could each carry their own skin tone modifier, then join them with a Zero Width Joiner to form a handshake. The result: 25 possible skin tone combinations.

But here's what happened. People started using 🫱 by itself. For handing things over, pointing in a direction, or as half of a visual gesture in text. The building block became the product. It's like discovering that the scaffolding around a building looks pretty good on its own.

In practice, 🫱 shows up in three main contexts. First, handing something to someone: "here, take this 🫱" or pairing it with an object emoji to create a "passing" gesture. Second, directional flow in text: pointing right toward the next thing, like an arrow with personality. Third, as part of emoji combos where you need a hand presenting or offering something.

It's not a high-frequency emoji. You won't see it in every group chat. But in creative emoji use, in TikTok bios, aesthetic emoji sets, and visual storytelling, it fills a role that the older pointing hand 👉 doesn't quite cover. 👉 is pointing AT something. 🫱 is offering or presenting something. The palm orientation matters.

The emoji you see started as an engineering problem. In 2019, Jennifer Daniel joined the Unicode Technical Committee and noticed the handshake emoji 🤝 had no skin tone support. Every other body-part emoji could be modified with Fitzpatrick skin tone modifiers, but the handshake involved two hands belonging to two different people. Applying one skin tone modifier made both hands the same color. There was no way to show two people of different skin tones shaking hands.

Her solution, proposed in November 2019: create two new standalone hand emojis, a rightwards hand and a leftwards hand, each capable of carrying its own skin tone modifier. Then combine them via ZWJ sequence to form a handshake. Right hand + skin tone A + ZWJ + left hand + skin tone B = a handshake between two people of different skin tones. Five skin tones times five gives 25 possible combinations.

Daniel has written about the design philosophy behind the decision: "Every time we add a new emoji, there's a risk it could exclude people without our consciously knowing it. I try to stop and ask what does equitable representation really look like, and when is it just performative?" The rightwards and leftwards hands weren't just new emoji. They were the mechanism that made the handshake inclusive.

The same Unicode 14.0 release also included 🫳 Palm Down Hand and 🫴 Palm Up Hand, proposed by Lauren Gawne, Jennifer Daniel, and Gretchen McCulloch. Together, the four directional hands give emoji users a complete set of hand orientations for the first time. Gawne and Daniel even published an academic paper studying the "past and future of hand emoji" at the ICWSM workshop.

Approved in Unicode 14.0 in September 2021. Codepoint U+1FAF1U+1FAF1. Part of the Supplemental Symbols and Pictographs block. The character was proposed alongside 🫲 Leftwards Hand specifically to enable multi-skin-tone handshake sequences. Jennifer Daniel submitted the initial proposal in November 2019 with the expectation of a 2021 release, but COVID-19 delayed Unicode deployments by six months, pushing it to 2022 on most devices.

1. 2019Jennifer Daniel proposes multi-skin-tone handshake to Unicode, requiring new directional hand emoji
2. 2020Palm Up and Palm Down hand proposals (L2/20-213) submitted by McCulloch, Gawne, and Daniel↗
3. 2021Unicode 14.0 officially ratifies all four directional hands (🫱🫲🫳🫴) plus 25 handshake skin tone combos↗
4. 2022Apple ships in iOS 15.4 (March). Google ships in Android 12L. Samsung in One UI 4.0↗
5. 2022Multi-skin-tone handshakes roll out across platforms, fulfilling the original proposal's goal

Hand gestures are culturally loaded, and palm direction is part of it. In Western cultures, an open hand extended outward is a neutral gesture of offering or greeting. But the specific orientation shown in 🫱, with the back of the hand facing the viewer, can read differently elsewhere. In some Middle Eastern and South Asian contexts, showing the back of your hand while gesturing can be considered impolite. The emoji itself doesn't carry these connotations (it's clearly a casual digital gesture), but it's worth knowing that hand orientation matters more in some cultures than others.

The bigger cultural story is what the rightwards hand enabled. Jennifer Daniel noted that the handshake emoji, without skin tone support, defaulted to the generic yellow that's supposed to be neutral but doesn't represent anyone in particular. By creating directional hands with independent skin tones, Unicode took a position: a handshake between two people of different skin tones should be representable. That decision was celebrated by diversity advocates and covered by Essence, HypeBeast, and Engadget.

• •This emoji exists because of a diversity problem. The handshake 🤝 couldn't have different skin tones on each hand, so Jennifer Daniel proposed creating separate left and right hand emoji as the mechanism to fix it.
• •The solution enabled 25 handshake skin tone combinations (5 tones x 5 tones). Before this, the handshake was stuck with default yellow, which didn't represent anyone specific.
• •Lauren Gawne and Jennifer Daniel published an academic paper called "The Past and Future of Hand Emoji" studying how hand emojis function as digital gesture.
• •The four directional hands (🫱🫲🫳🫴) were proposed by three linguists and emoji researchers: Jennifer Daniel, Lauren Gawne, and Gretchen McCulloch (author of "Because Internet" and co-host of the Lingthusiasm podcast).
• •COVID-19 delayed this emoji by six months. The original target was 2021, but all Unicode deployments were pushed back, and it didn't ship on most devices until 2022.

• •Some people read 🫱 as a "stop" or "push away" gesture, confusing it with 🫸 (rightwards pushing hand). The open palm orientation is similar, but 🫱 is neutral/offering while 🫸 is actively pushing.
• •When used alone without context, it can be ambiguous. Is it handing something over? Gesturing rightward? Reaching out? Without accompanying text or emojis, the meaning isn't always clear.

• •Jennifer Daniel wrote about the emoji's backstory in her Substack piece "Pressing flesh against flesh 🤝", detailing the multi-year effort to create a more inclusive handshake. The article became a reference for tech and design journalists covering emoji diversity.
• •The multi-skin-tone handshake generated coverage across major outlets: Engadget, HypeBeast, Essence, and 9to5Google all ran pieces when it was announced. The headline framing was almost always about inclusion and representation, not about a new hand emoji.
• •Snopes fact-checked whether the multi-skin-toned handshake was actually coming, which gives you a sense of how much anticipation there was. The answer was yes, confirmed.

• •Codepoint U+1FAF1U+1FAF1. Single character in UTF-32. Surrogate pair in UTF-16.
• •Skin tone modifiers (Fitzpatrick types 1-5) can be appended directly: U+1FAF1U+1FAF1 + U+1F3FBU+1F3FB through U+1F3FFU+1F3FF.
• •The multi-skin-tone handshake is a ZWJ sequence: 🫱🫱 + skin tone + U+200DU+200D + 🫲🫲 + skin tone. That's 25 combinations (5 x 5).
• •On unsupported platforms, the handshake ZWJ falls back to showing 🫱 and 🫲 side by side with individual skin tones. Not ideal but still readable.
• •Shortcodes: :rightwards_hand::rightwards_hand: on Slack and Discord. GitHub doesn't have a dedicated shortcode.
• •If you're building an emoji picker, group 🫱🫲🫳🫴 together as "directional hands." Users expect to find them as a set.

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