Selfie Emoji

A disembodied arm holding a smartphone at arm's length, as if snapping a self-portrait. It's the emoji that captured a cultural moment so specific that Oxford Dictionaries named "selfie" their Word of the Year in 2013, three years before the emoji itself was approved.

Emojipedia describes it as a hand holding up a mobile phone to take a photo of the person holding it. The emoji arrived in Unicode 9.0 (2016) alongside culturally loaded additions like 🤦 Face Palm, 🤷 Shrug, and 🥓 Bacon.

The selfie concept predates the emoji by over a decade. The word first appeared in an Australian chat room on September 13, 2002, where a man posted a photo of his injured lip after falling down drunk. By 2013, the word's usage had increased 17,000% in a single year, beating out "bitcoin" and "twerk" for Word of the Year.

Self-portraiture goes back even further. Robert Cornelius produced the first photographic self-portrait in 1839 in Philadelphia. And the first selfie in space was taken by Buzz Aldrin during the Gemini 12 mission on November 12, 1966, a Guinness World Record he later commemorated with a T-shirt. From an 1839 daguerreotype to a 1966 spacewalk to a 2002 drunk Australian to a 2016 emoji: self-portraiture has been finding new media for almost 200 years.

🤳 is both a descriptor and a call to action. "Just took the best 🤳" announces a selfie post. "We need a 🤳" suggests a group photo. "Living for the 🤳" comments on someone being chronically online.

The emoji captures an entire ecosystem: front-facing cameras (iPhone 4, 2010), Instagram filters, ring lights, and the concept of curating your own image. It's also become a shorthand for selfie culture's darker side. A 2024 study published in SAGE journals found that narcissistic traits predict selfie addiction, and a Personality and Individual Differences study found the correlation was stronger in men.

The most sobering statistic: 480 people died taking selfies between 2008 and 2024. That's about 43 per year, more than die from shark attacks. Men are three times more likely to die. The average age is 23. India accounts for 47% of all selfie deaths. Falls cause 44% of incidents, followed by drowning (21%) and trains (16%). The selfie has a body count, and 🤳 sits innocuously on the keyboard next to it.

The selfie stick, which is almost a physical extension of the 🤳 emoji, has its own story. Japanese engineer Hiroshi Ueda patented a "telescopic extender" for cameras in 1983. It appeared in a 1995 book of "101 Un-Useless Japanese Inventions" (yes, they thought it was useless). Canadian inventor Wayne Fromm reinvented it as the Quik Pod in 2005. By 2015, selfie sticks were banned at Disneyland, Versailles, the Vatican Museums, the Colosseum, Coachella, Premier League stadiums, and the Smithsonian.

Self-portraiture is ancient. Robert Cornelius produced the first photographic self-portrait in 1839, a daguerreotype that now sits in the Library of Congress. But the modern selfie culture started with hardware: Apple's iPhone 4 (2010) shipped the first front-facing camera on an iPhone, turning every phone into a two-way mirror. Instagram launched the same year. Snapchat followed in 2011. The selfie became the dominant form of personal photography.

The word "selfie" first appeared on September 13, 2002, in an Australian online forum. The user had fallen down drunk and posted a photo of his injured lip. "I had a selfie of it," he wrote. The word's usage increased 17,000% in 2013, earning it Oxford's Word of the Year over "bitcoin" and "twerk."

Before the emoji arrived, the selfie stick already had a complicated history. Japanese engineer Hiroshi Ueda at Minolta patented a telescopic camera extender in 1983. It appeared in the 1995 book "101 Un-Useless Japanese Inventions", filed under "useless but not completely useless." Canadian inventor Wayne Fromm reinvented it as the Quik Pod in 2005. By 2015, the sticks were banned at Disney, the Vatican, Versailles, the Colosseum, Coachella, and Premier League stadiums.

The emoji 🤳 arrived in Unicode 9.0 (2016), three years after the word peaked and one year after selfie sticks were being confiscated at museum doors. It captured a phenomenon that was already being parodied.

1. 2002The word 'selfie' first appears in an Australian online forum
2. 2010iPhone 4 ships the first front-facing camera on an iPhone, enabling smartphone selfies
3. 2013'Selfie' named Oxford Dictionaries' Word of the Year after 17,000% usage increase
4. 2014Ellen's Oscar selfie earns 3.4M retweets, crashing Twitter
5. 2015Selfie sticks banned at Disney, Vatican, Versailles, Coachella. Kim K publishes 'Selfish'
6. 2016🤳 approved in Unicode 9.0 as SELFIE, part of Emoji 3.0↗

Selfie culture isn't uniform across the globe. India accounts for 47% of all selfie-related deaths, leading to the country designating "no-selfie zones" at dangerous tourist spots like cliffs, waterfalls, and railway tracks. Mumbai police established 16 no-selfie zones in 2016 after a string of deaths.

In South Korea, the selfie is deeply embedded in beauty culture. Korean beauty standards emphasize skin clarity and small facial proportions, and selfie apps like Snow and B612 (which originate in Korea) come preloaded with skin-smoothing and face-slimming filters. The aesthetic is different from Western Instagram filters.

In Japan, the selfie evolved differently too. Purikura (print club) photo booths, which have been popular since the 1990s, predate smartphone selfies. These booths automatically enlarge eyes, smooth skin, and add stickers. The Japanese selfie aesthetic was filtered before filters existed.

In conservative cultures, selfies can be complicated. In Saudi Arabia, the 2013 lifting of the camera phone ban and the subsequent rise of selfie culture among women was seen as a form of social liberation, particularly as women's faces had traditionally been excluded from public imagery.

• •The word "selfie" was first used on September 13, 2002, by an Australian man posting about drunkenly falling on his face.
• •Oxford Dictionaries reported that usage of "selfie" increased 17,000% in 2013, beating "bitcoin" and "twerk" for Word of the Year.
• •Ellen DeGeneres' Oscar selfie (March 2, 2014) earned 3.4 million retweets, crashed Twitter for 20 minutes, and was taken on a Samsung Galaxy (Samsung sponsored the Oscars). Bradley Cooper held the phone.
• •480 people died taking selfies between 2008 and 2024. India accounts for 47% of deaths. Mumbai designated 16 no-selfie zones. Falls cause 44% of incidents.
• •Buzz Aldrin took the first selfie in space during the Gemini 12 mission on November 12, 1966. He later sold T-shirts commemorating it.
• •Kim Kardashian's *Selfish*) (2015) is a 445-page NYT bestselling coffee table book of her selfies. The title leans into the narcissism criticism.
• •The selfie stick was patented in 1983 by Japanese engineer Hiroshi Ueda and appeared in "101 Un-Useless Japanese Inventions" in 1995. By 2015 it was banned at Disney, the Vatican, Versailles, Coachella, and Premier League stadiums.
• •Coachella banned selfie sticks in 2015, publicly calling them "narsissistics."
• •A 2024 SAGE journal study confirmed that narcissistic traits predict selfie addiction. The correlation was stronger in men.

• •Some people use 🤳 ironically to mock selfie culture. Others use it proudly. The same emoji, two opposite attitudes. Context determines which.
• •In regions where selfie deaths are a real problem (India, Russia), 🤳 near a cliff or rail carries a different weight than in casual Western usage.
• •Older users sometimes confuse 🤳 for a phone call gesture. The arm-extended angle is specifically about selfie-taking, not phone use in general.

• •Ellen's Oscar selfie (March 2014) — The most retweeted tweet in history (at the time): 3.4 million retweets, crashed Twitter for 20 minutes. Bradley Cooper held the Samsung Galaxy phone. Ellen asked the audience to help break Obama's 2012 retweet record, and they did it before the broadcast ended.
• •Buzz Aldrin's space selfie (1966) — Guinness World Record for the first selfie in open space. Aldrin perched a camera on the Gemini 12 hatch, lifted his visor, and snapped himself with Earth in the background. He later sold commemorative T-shirts.
• •**Kim Kardashian's Selfish (2015)** — A 445-page coffee table book) of selfies spanning 1984-2014. NYT bestseller. The title was a deliberate play on the narcissism accusations. Slate's review called it "unexpectedly revealing."
• •The selfie stick: 'useless' to banned — Japanese inventor Hiroshi Ueda patented the selfie stick in 1983. It appeared in "101 Un-Useless Japanese Inventions" in 1995. By 2015 it was banned at Disney, the Vatican, Versailles, the Colosseum, and Coachella. From joke to essential to banned in 12 years.
• •480 selfie deaths — The Swiftest's global database documents 480 selfie-related fatalities between 2008-2024. India accounts for 47%. Mumbai established 16 no-selfie zones. The annual death toll exceeds shark attacks.

• •Codepoint: U+1F933U+1F933. Unicode name: SELFIE. Common shortcodes: :selfie::selfie: (Slack, Discord, GitHub).
• •Supports all five Fitzpatrick skin tone modifiers. Single codepoint, no ZWJ sequences. The rendering typically shows just an arm and phone, not a full person.
• •Some platforms show the phone screen facing the viewer; others show it facing away. Test rendering across devices if the visual matters for your UI.

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