Shaved Ice Emoji

🍧 is kakigori (かき氷), a Japanese shaved ice dessert. It is not a snow cone and it is not ice cream. Kakigori is shaved fresh ice with flavored syrup poured over it, usually eaten with a spoon. The shape and texture are closer to freshly fallen snow than to the crushed ice of an American snow cone, which is why a spoon works but a cone wouldn't.

On most platforms the emoji shows a single color of syrup. Apple uses red, which reads as strawberry or cherry. Google goes brighter and more multicolor. Samsung and Microsoft render it paler. The underlying image is the same: a mounded pile of ice in a bowl or cup, signaled by the distinctive conical peak.

This is one of the most misused emojis on every platform. Because it looks similar to 🍨 (scooped ice cream in a bowl), most people send 🍧 when they mean ice cream, and most people send 🍨 when they mean shaved ice. The distinction is: ice cream is creamy dairy, shaved ice is water plus syrup.

🍧 lives at the intersection of summer, Japan, and dessert-shop culture. It spikes when people post kakigori from Japanese cafes, bingsu from Korean dessert spots like Sulbing, halo-halo from Filipino restaurants, and shave ice from Hawaiian stands.

It also gets used wrongly as a generic ice cream emoji, often by people who assume the red-topped version is strawberry ice cream. If you are posting kakigori or bingsu, 🍧 is the correct pick. If you are posting ice cream, use 🍦 or 🍨 instead.

Hashtags where 🍧 shows up consistently: #kakigori, #bingsu, #shaveice, #halohalo, #빙수 (Korean for bingsu), #かき氷 (Japanese for kakigori). Japanese food accounts treat it as their native ice emoji and use it year-round, not just in summer.

🍧 is neutral, friendly, food-focused. Unlike 🍦 (which has mild NSFW usage in meme circles) and 🍨 (which reads as celebration), 🍧 is just 'let's go get dessert.' Its cultural specificity makes it read as 'I know this cafe' or 'I love kakigori,' not as flirtation.

• •🍧 + cafe name = dessert recommendation
• •🍧 + 🇯🇵 or 🇰🇷 = cultural food reference
• •🍧 + ☀️ = summer cool-down post
• •🍧 alone = confused user, probably meant 🍨

The oldest written reference to kakigori is in The Pillow Book (Makura no Soshi), written by court lady Sei Shonagon around the year 1000 during the Heian period. She listed kezurihi, shaved ice topped with amazura vine sap and served in a new metal bowl, as one of the most elegant things. In the Heian era, ice was preserved through winter in mountain himuro ice houses and shaved in summer for the imperial court. Only the nobility could afford it.

Kakigori stayed an aristocratic luxury until industrial ice arrived in the 19th century. The first commercial kakigori shop opened in Yokohama in 1869, a few years after Japan reopened to the West and ice became broadly available. From there it became a summer street food and a fixture of matsuri festivals.

Kakigori spread outward with the Japanese diaspora. Shave ice in Hawaii came from Japanese plantation workers in the early 1900s. Halo-halo in the Philippines evolved from kakigori-style 'Mong-ya' sold by Japanese immigrants after the 1902 opening of the Insular Ice Plant in Manila. Korean bingsu has separate roots in the Joseon court but took its modern milk-ice form in the 1970s after condensed milk and chocolate syrup arrived via the US military. The Sulbing chain opened its first branch in Busan in 2010 and has since expanded to 16 countries with over 480 stores, making bingsu a global dessert rather than a Korean one.

The emoji itself was approved in Unicode 6.0 in 2010 as part of the Japanese-carrier legacy emoji set. SoftBank and DoCoMo had carried kakigori pictographs since 2000, which is how a dessert that most of the world had never heard of ended up in the default keyboard on every phone.

1. 2000SoftBank and DoCoMo Japanese mobile carriers ship early kakigori pictographs on i-mode phones
2. 2010Unicode 6.0 approves 🍧 at U+1F367 as SHAVED ICE↗
3. 2015Emoji 1.0 ships 🍧 across all major vendors
4. 2018Apple redesigns 🍧 with a brighter cherry-red syrup over clearer white ice

• •The oldest reference to kakigori is in Sei Shonagon's Pillow Book, written around the year 1000. She described shaved ice with amazura vine sap, served in a new metal bowl, as one of the most elegant things.
• •July 25 is Kakigori Day in Japan because 7-2-5 reads as 'natsu-goori' (summer ice) and because Yamagata City recorded Japan's then-record 40.8°C heat on July 25, 1933.
• •The traditional kakigori shop flag, a red 氷 (kori) kanji on a blue-and-white background, has been in use for more than 100 years and is still how shops advertise shaved ice in Japan.
• •Halo-halo, the Philippines' unofficial national dessert, evolved from Japanese kakigori via a pre-war dessert called Mong-ya, sold by Japanese immigrants after the 1902 opening of Manila's first Insular Ice Plant.
• •Hawaiian shave ice (never shaved ice) came to Hawaii with Japanese plantation workers in the early 1900s. The Japanese shaving technique produces a fluffier texture than the crushed ice used in mainland American snow cones.
• •Sulbing, the Korean bingsu cafe chain founded in Busan in 2010, invented milk-shaved-ice patbingsu with Injeolmi rice cake in 2013 and has since expanded to 480+ stores in 16 countries.
• •Romans were eating shaved ice before they had sugar. Mountain snow was preserved in straw-insulated pits and flavored with honey or fruit juice. Emperor Nero allegedly particularly enjoyed it.
• •Most people confuse 🍧 with 🍨. Multiple sources call it one of the most misused emojis in the world. A confused cherry-topped 🍨 is closer to shaved ice than creamy ice cream on some platforms, which doesn't help.

• •Sei Shonagon's Pillow Book, c. 1000 AD. Shonagon lists kezurihi (shaved ice topped with amazura sap in a new metal bowl) among her 'elegant things,' the oldest written reference to kakigori and the world's oldest endorsement of shaved ice.
• •The 氷 flag, a century-old logo. Japanese kakigori shops still fly a blue-and-white banner with the red kanji for ice. The design hasn't meaningfully changed in over 100 years.
• •Sulbing and the global bingsu wave. The Korean chain opened in Busan in 2010, created milk-shaved-ice patbingsu with Injeolmi (rice cake) in 2013, and expanded to 16 countries, making Korean shaved ice a worldwide dessert.
• •Halo-halo as national dessert. The Philippines has no official national dish, but halo-halo is widely called the unofficial national dessert. Its origin as a Japanese-Filipino hybrid is a rare example of colonial-era food becoming a national symbol.
• •July 25 Kakigori Day. Japan designates July 25 as Kakigori Day both because 7-2-5 can be read as 'natsu-goori' (summer ice) and because Yamagata City recorded 40.8°C on that day in 1933, a national heat record that held for decades.

• •🍧 is U+1F367U+1F367. The sibling dessert emojis are 🍦 (U+1F366U+1F366, soft serve) and 🍨 (U+1F368U+1F368, scooped ice cream / sundae).
• •If you are building a Japanese or Korean food app, 🍧 is a more accurate 'dessert' fallback than 🍦 or 🍨 because both kakigori and bingsu are in-culture dessert defaults.
• •The emoji's Unicode name (SHAVED ICE) is specific and correct. Do not default to :ice_cream::ice_cream: for Japanese food contexts.
• •Apple renders 🍧 with red syrup, Google uses multicolor, Samsung is paler. If your mockup depends on syrup color, test across vendors.

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