Saluting Face Emoji

A yellow face with its right hand raised in a salute. On Apple and Huawei, only half the face is visible behind the saluting hand, a design choice that makes the gesture more prominent at small sizes. The expression underneath is neutral to serious: this isn't a casual wave.

Dictionary.com describes it as showing "respect, admiration, deference, agreement, or obedience with the purest, most earnest, unironic sincerity, or with the most sarcastic snark and not-so-subtle resistance imaginable." That duality is what makes 🫡 so versatile. "Will do, boss 🫡" can be genuine obedience or barely-concealed resentment, and both readings are valid. The emoji was proposed by Jennifer Daniel and Shiraz Fuman in 2019 after years of it being one of the most requested emojis on Emojipedia's annual surveys. It can be considered the emoji version of "o7", the text-based salute emoticon (where "o" is a head and "7" is a raised arm) that originated in EVE Online's player community around 2004 and spread through gaming culture to Twitch.

But 🫡 found its defining cultural moment not in gaming but in tech layoffs. In November 2022, when Elon Musk acquired Twitter and issued an "extremely hardcore" ultimatum to staff, employees posted 🫡 in internal Slack channels as they chose to leave rather than sign the pledge. The New York Times covered the phenomenon under the headline "Saluting in Solidarity." As Meta and Amazon announced their own layoffs, the salute spread to those companies too. 🫡 became the placard of the digital world: a dignified farewell between departing colleagues.

🫡 operates across three distinct registers, and knowing which one someone is using requires reading the context carefully.

First, the genuine respect register: "Thank you for your service 🫡" on Veterans Day posts, reacting to someone's impressive achievement, or acknowledging a friend who did something above and beyond. This is straightforward and warm.

Second, the "yes sir" acknowledgment register: "On it 🫡" in a work Slack, "Will do 🫡" in response to a request, or "Understood 🫡" after receiving instructions. This is efficient and professional, functioning almost like a digital nod.

Third, the sarcastic obedience register: "Sure, I'll work this weekend too 🫡" or "Another all-hands meeting? 🫡" This is where the salute becomes resistance disguised as compliance. The military formality makes the sarcasm land harder because it's performed rather than expressed.

On TikTok, 🫡 punctuates "respect" content: someone doing something bold, a parent making a tough call, a person standing up for themselves. In gaming communities, it's the spiritual successor to o7, used in Twitch chat and Discord to show respect for plays, farewells, or fallen characters. At work, it's become genuinely useful: "Sprint started 🫡" in a Monday standup Slack message sets a military-efficiency tone without being too serious.

The text-based salute predates the emoji by nearly two decades. "o7" (where "o" is a head and "7" is a raised arm) emerged in EVE Online's player community around 2004, where the game's treacherous universe made friendly communication rare and therefore precious. An Urban Dictionary entry from April 2007 is the earliest documented definition. From EVE, it spread to Elite Dangerous (where "o7 Commander" became the default greeting), then to Star Citizen, Twitch chat, and general gaming culture.

Jennifer Daniel and Shiraz Fuman proposed the emoji in 2019 (L2/19-396), noting that a saluting face had been one of the most popularly requested emojis for several years on Emojipedia's surveys. The proposal addressed a design challenge: salutes look different across military traditions worldwide. Rather than copying a specific national style, they created a hybrid gesture that feels like a salute without belonging to any single tradition. The design is a diplomat.

🫡 was approved in Unicode 14.0 (2021) and arrived on phones in early 2022. But its defining moment came months later. In November 2022, Elon Musk acquired Twitter and sent an email demanding employees commit to being "extremely hardcore" or leave. When the 5 PM deadline passed, hundreds of employees chose to depart. Their Slack channels filled with 🫡. The Seattle Times reported that the emoji had become "a symbol inside Twitter of respect for those who are leaving." The New York Times covered it as "Saluting in Solidarity." Twitter's version of the emoji, with its intense eyebrows and straight mouth, implied a grim acceptance of fate rather than cheerful obedience.

As Meta and Amazon announced their own layoffs in the months that followed, 🫡 migrated to those companies' internal channels too. It became the farewell gesture of the tech industry: a dignified exit, a hat-tip to colleagues, and a quiet refusal to perform enthusiasm about your own termination. Business Standard called it "the placard of the digital world."

Approved in Unicode 14.0 (2021) as U+1FAE1U+1FAE1 SALUTING FACE. Proposed by Jennifer Daniel and Shiraz Fuman in L2/19-396. It had been one of Emojipedia's most requested emojis for several years before approval. Part of the Unicode 14.0 batch alongside 🥹, 🫠, 🫶, and 🫣 Face with Peeking Eye. Jennifer Daniel wrote about it on her Substack. Apple and Huawei's designs show only half the face behind the saluting hand, while Google shows the full face.

1. 2004"o7" text salute emerges in EVE Online's player community↗
2. 2007First Urban Dictionary entry for o7 (April 30)↗
3. 2019Jennifer Daniel and Shiraz Fuman submit proposal L2/19-396 to Unicode↗
4. 2021Unicode 14.0 approves 🫡 as U+1FAE1 SALUTING FACE↗
5. 2022Goes viral during Twitter layoffs under Musk. NYT covers it as "Saluting in Solidarity"↗

Same chart, different generations

• •🫡 went viral during Twitter's 2022 layoffs when departing employees filled Slack channels with salutes after Elon Musk's "extremely hardcore" ultimatum. The New York Times covered it as "Saluting in Solidarity." The gesture migrated to Meta and Amazon layoffs too.
• •The text-based salute o7 originated in EVE Online around 2004. The "o" is a head, the "7" is a raised arm. It spread to Elite Dangerous (where "o7 Commander" became the default greeting), Star Citizen, Twitch, and general internet culture. 🫡 is its graphical evolution.
• •Apple and Huawei's designs show only half the face behind the saluting hand, making the gesture more prominent at small sizes. Google shows the full face. The design difference means the emoji feels more military on Apple and more casual on Google.
• •Jennifer Daniel wrote a dedicated Substack piece about 🫡, noting the challenge of designing a salute that doesn't belong to any single military tradition. The result is a diplomatic hybrid gesture.
• •Business Standard called 🫡 "the placard of the digital world" during the 2022 tech layoffs, comparing it to a physical sign of protest adapted for digital communication.
• •The defining 🫡 moment happened on November 17, 2022: after Elon Musk emailed Twitter staff an "extremely hardcore" ultimatum, an internal Slack channel filled with salute emojis from employees choosing to leave. The salute then migrated from Slack to Twitter itself, and to Meta and Amazon as those companies announced their own layoffs. One emoji became the exit sign of the entire 2022 tech reckoning.
• •On the morning of Queen Elizabeth II's funeral, September 19 2022, UK broadcaster Channel 5 aired The Emoji Movie as counter-programming while every other network carried the coffin. Twitter responded by flooding posts about the Queen with 🫡, an unintentional meta-joke: the emoji-movie network skipped the salute, so the public sent saluting emojis instead.
• •The March 2025 "Signalgate" leak revealed US cabinet officials coordinating a Yemen strike in a Signal chat using 🙏, 💪, 🇺🇸, 👊, 🔥, but no 🫡. Commentators noted the omission: for a room full of military-adjacent decision-makers, the absence of a single salute was striking, as if the professional gesture had been consciously swapped for a sports-locker-room register.
• •Emojipedia editor Keith Broni told the Seattle Times that during the Twitter layoffs the saluting face climbed from obscurity to the fifth most-clicked emoji on Emojipedia. The site's traffic is a leading indicator of what people are trying to understand, not what they're using, so a spike there is basically a confusion event made visible.
• •The popular visor-lift origin story for the military salute is explicitly rejected by the US Army's own Quartermaster Museum, which calls it a "romantic legend". The Army's preferred origin is flatter: juniors used to remove their hats in front of superiors, 18th-century hats got too big to keep pulling off, the gesture shortened to a brim-touch, and the brim-touch became the modern salute.
• •The Royal Navy's palm-down salute (where the palm is hidden) likely descends from tar-stained sailor hands. Deck hands constantly handled pitch and tar to waterproof rope and wood, so their palms were permanently black. Officers preferred not to see them. Three centuries later, the UK Royal Navy still salutes with the palm turned away.
• •The Polish military salutes with two fingers, not four or five. Legend traces it to a Napoleonic-era Polish courier who, after losing fingers to shrapnel, delivered an urgent dispatch to Prince Józef Poniatowski and saluted with the three fingers he had left. The prince adopted the gesture in his honor. Polish troops still use it today.
• •Emoji-free workplace messages score highest on perceived competence, per a 2025 study. 🫡 is the partial exception: its military register raises the floor compared to 👍 or 😊, but "no emoji" still wins. The salute's best role at work is fluency-signaling to an already-emoji-friendly team, not impressing the board.
• •The 🫡 emoji arrived on iPhones with iOS 15.4 in March 2022, meaning its first major public test was Queen Elizabeth II's funeral six months later. Users had the gesture available for roughly 25 weeks before a worldwide event demanded it. That's one of the tightest gaps between emoji release and defining cultural use on record.
• •The salute is one of the only emojis whose official name was changed for political reasons. Jennifer Daniel's original proposal was titled "SALUTE," but the Unicode committee added "FACE" to make clear it was the facial gesture, not a rank-specific military rendering, and to keep it grouped with other face emojis rather than in the hand-gesture block.

• •The sarcastic compliance register ("Yes sir 🫡") can be genuinely confusing for managers who read it as sincere. Some workplace conflicts have emerged from this ambiguity.
• •Military veterans may find casual use of a salute emoji disrespectful. The proposal authors addressed this by designing a hybrid gesture that doesn't copy any specific national military salute.
• •In some contexts, 🫡 can read as resignation or defeat ("I accept my fate 🫡") rather than respect or agreement. The Twitter layoff association strengthened this melancholic reading.

• •🫡 went viral during the November 2022 Twitter layoffs under Elon Musk. FRANCE 24 and international news covered the mass exodus. When half of Twitter's 7,500 employees were let go, departing workers posted 🫡 as a dignified farewell. The New York Times and Rolling Stone ran features calling it the "best emoji of 2022."
• •Rolling Stone named 🫡 "the best emoji of 2022", writing that it captured the grim acceptance of the tech industry's mass firings better than any words could. The emoji's straight mouth and intense eyebrows (in the Twitter/X rendering) conveyed stoic resignation.
• •The "o7" text emoticon (a person saluting, viewed from above) has been used in gaming communities since the early 2000s, particularly in EVE Online and Star Citizen, as a farewell or sign of respect when a player leaves. When 🫡 arrived in 2022, gaming communities adopted it as the graphic upgrade of o7.
• •On TikTok, 🫡 became the standard comment response to videos showing impressive or admirable moments. "Respect 🫡" in comment sections replaced longer phrases, and the emoji's military connotation added a layer of formality that other positive reactions lacked.