Sun Behind Rain Cloud Emoji

The sun behind rain cloud emoji (🌦️) shows the sun peeking out while rain falls beneath a cloud. This is the sunshower, the weather paradox where it's raining and sunny at the same time. Nature can't decide, and almost every culture on Earth has folklore explaining why.

In Japan, sunshowers are kitsune no yomeiri, "the fox's wedding", foxes hold secret wedding processions during sunshowers, a superstition so culturally embedded that Akira Kurosawa opened his 1990 film Dreams) with a boy watching exactly this. In Korea it's the tiger's wedding. In South Africa, a monkey's wedding. Sri Lanka: the jackals' wedding. In France and parts of the American South: the devil is beating his wife. Swift wrote about it; French plays used it in the 1700s. Animal-wedding and trickster-devil myths for this one specific weather event show up across unrelated cultures, the visual paradox is striking enough that humans everywhere needed a story for it.

Figurative use followed. 🌦️ is the bittersweet emoji, happy and sad coexisting, graduation feels, moving day, promotions that come with loss. Psychologists call this emotional ambivalence, and research suggests that being able to hold both feelings at once is correlated with a deeper sense of meaning and purpose. 🌦️ is the emoji version of that.

Approved in Unicode 7.0 (2014) as U+1F326U+1F326 WHITE SUN BEHIND CLOUD WITH RAIN.

🌦️ does four distinct jobs in everyday use, and most people don't realize how much ground it covers.

Mixed emotions. "Happy and sad at the same time 🌦️" is the primary figurative use. Graduation (exciting but terrifying), breakups (relief but grief), promotions (proud but overwhelmed), moving to a new city, any situation with simultaneous positive and negative feelings. Mental-health creators use it specifically because most significant life moments are mixed, not pure.

Literal sunshowers. When it actually rains while the sun is out, people post it because it feels rare and a little magical. "It's doing the thing 🌦️" captures the delight. Sunshowers are more common in tropical regions, rarer in temperate ones, which makes them photogenic enough to caption.

Rainbow setup. 🌦️🌈 is the most meteorologically correct emoji combo. Rainbows require sunlight, rain, and a specific viewing angle, sunshowers naturally create all three. Caption: "if you're in 🌦️ weather, turn your back to the sun and look up."

Cultural folklore posts. Kitsune no yomeiri TikToks, the devil-and-wife idiom, the monkey's wedding, creators explaining why different cultures have different animal-wedding myths for sunshowers have produced a steady drip of educational content since around 2020.

Sunshowers have almost certainly fascinated humans as long as humans have been looking at the sky. The paradox of simultaneous sun and rain shows up in folklore across continents that had no contact for most of history, suggesting the visual was striking enough that every culture independently reached for a story.

The Japanese kitsune no yomeiri is documented in Edo-period (1603-1868) art and literature, and was already an established folk belief when Jonathan Swift was writing about "the devil beating his wife" in 18th-century English. French plays of the same era used "le diable bat sa femme", "the devil beats his wife." In Korea, tigers marry. In South Africa, it's a monkey's wedding. In Argentina, "the monkey at the wedding of Mirtha Legrand." In Sri Lanka, the jackals.

The emoji arrived late to this millennia-long conversation. Unicode 7.0 (June 2014) added 🌦️ as part of the six-emoji weather expansion (alongside 🌤️🌥️🌧️🌨️🌩️). Name: WHITE SUN BEHIND CLOUD WITH RAIN, a technical label, but the meaning it picked up almost immediately was "bittersweet," not just "sunshower."

• •Sunshowers have animal-wedding folk names in nearly every culture. Japan: fox's wedding. Korea: tiger's wedding. South Africa: monkey's wedding. Sri Lanka: jackals' wedding. The visual paradox is so striking that humans everywhere independently reached for a wedding-and-trickster story.
• •Akira Kurosawa's 1990 film *Dreams*) opens with "Sunshine Through the Rain," a scene of a young boy watching a fox wedding procession during a sunshower. It's essentially an 🌦️ content film.
• •Sunshowers produce the best rainbows by a wide margin. Rainbows need sunlight, rain, and a 42-degree viewing angle from the antisolar point. Sunshowers naturally create all three at once. If you ever see 🌦️ weather, turn your back to the sun, look at the rain, and you'll almost always find 🌈.
• •The idiom "the devil is beating his wife" traces back to 18th-century Europe. French plays used "le diable bat sa femme et marie sa fille"; Jonathan Swift used an English variant. It's still in everyday use in parts of the American South.
• •Psychology research on bittersweet emotions finds that people able to hold positive and negative feelings at the same time report a deeper sense of life meaning and purpose. 🌦️ is the emoji of emotional maturity.
• •Meteorologically, sunshowers happen when rain falls from a cloud that doesn't cover the sun's position, or when wind carries rain from a distant shower. They're more common in the tropics and subtropics, rarer in temperate climates, which is why temperate-climate posters treat them as rare and magical.
• •The Unicode name for 🌦️ is 'WHITE SUN BEHIND CLOUD WITH RAIN', a holdover from early black-and-white symbol fonts where 'black' meant filled and 'white' meant outlined. No modern platform renders the sun white.