Tooth Emoji
U+1F9B7:tooth:About Tooth 🦷
Tooth () is part of the People & Body group in Unicode. Added in Unicode E11.0. Type on GitHub and Slack to use it. Click copy above to grab it, paste it anywhere.
Works in iMessage, WhatsApp, Discord, Slack, Instagram, Twitter, Gmail, and every app that supports Unicode.
Often associated with dentist, pearly, teeth, and 1 more keywords.
Meaning varies across cultures, see cultural notes below.
Scroll down for the full story: meaning, trends, combos, and more.
How it looks
What does it mean?
A single white tooth, drawn as a premolar on every major platform. 🦷 covers the whole dental universe: toothaches, dentist bills, wisdom-tooth recovery videos, the Tooth Fairy leaving five bucks under a pillow, and the idiomatic "sweet tooth." It's the only tooth in the keyboard, so it has to do all the work.
Dental appointments and pain. "Dentist tomorrow 🦷," "my wisdom teeth are killing me 🦷," "the bill was $1,200 🦷😭." Before 🦷 arrived in Unicode 11.0 in June 2018 there was no clean way to represent a tooth in a message. The closest option was 😬, and that's a face, not a tooth.
The Tooth Fairy. The second-biggest use. Parents caption "first lost tooth 🦷✨" photos, and kids text grandparents receipts for payment. The going rate in the US is roughly $5.84 per tooth according to Delta Dental's 2024 poll, down from a pandemic high of $6.23. First teeth fetch a premium around $7.09.
Sweet tooth and candy talk. "I have the worst sweet tooth 🦷🍬" is the idiomatic third lane. The emoji gets paired with dessert emojis to signal cravings, cheat meals, or general candy-brained energy.
Grillz, gems, and cosmetic dentistry. Since the 2021 Y2K revival, 🦷 has become the unofficial icon of tooth gems, grillz, veneers, and whitening content. Tooth gem videos alone cracked 54 million views on TikTok by mid-2021 and the hashtag kept climbing. The emoji anchors before-and-after posts for everything from cheap DIY kits to Post Malone's 12-carat diamond fangs.
🦷 skews practical rather than emotional. It shows up in dental-care posts, Tooth Fairy captions, wisdom-tooth recovery content (the anesthesia-kicks-in videos are a whole TikTok genre), and beauty content around whitening, veneers, and tooth gems.
By platform. On Instagram it's a caption emoji for dentists, hygienists, orthodontists, and cosmetic-dentistry clinics. On TikTok it's shorthand for recovery vlogs, tooth-gem tutorials, and "dental horror story" storytimes. On X it trends briefly when a celebrity gets new veneers, when a $189 billion annual dental spend stat goes viral, or when the Tooth Fairy's going rate updates.
By audience. Dental professionals use it earnestly. Gen Z uses it half-ironically, often alongside 😭 (wisdom-tooth surgery), 💸 (cost), or ✨ (tooth gems). Millennials use it straight, usually in parent mode about their kids' first lost teeth. Boomers mostly don't use it, mostly because the keyboard section it lives in isn't one people browse.
A single tooth (drawn as a premolar). It stands in for anything dental: dentist appointments, toothaches, lost baby teeth, wisdom-tooth surgery, Tooth Fairy posts, tooth gems, and the "sweet tooth" idiom. It's the only tooth emoji in the keyboard, so it does all the work.
The modern anatomy emoji family
What it means from...
"First lost tooth 🦷" is a classic parent caption. Grandparents send it back with 💰 in reply.
"Getting my wisdom teeth out tomorrow 🦷💀" — friends rally with recovery tips and promises to bring soup.
Usually literal: a reminder about a dentist appointment or a complaint about a toothache. Rarely flirty.
"Out this afternoon, dentist 🦷" — standard office slack-status emoji. No subtext.
It's almost never flirty. 🦷 is usually literal — "dentist tomorrow," "sweet tooth," "my wisdom teeth hurt." If someone sends it to you, they're probably talking about their actual mouth, not dropping a hint.
Emoji combos
What 🦷 gets used for
Origin story
🦷 was one of 157 new emojis in Emoji 11.0, which Unicode approved in February 2018 and released in June 2018. It landed in the same batch as the hot face 🥵, the partying face 🥳, the superhero 🦸, and the lobster 🦞. The tooth fills a real communicative gap: dentistry was one of the most common topics without a dedicated emoji before this drop. Emojipedia's 2017 roundup of proposed additions explicitly listed "Tooth" alongside Bone and Foot as likely approvals, and the Unicode body-parts subgroup was filled out accordingly.
There is no single "proposer" credit the way some celebrity emojis (dumpling, hijab) have. Tooth was part of a broader body-parts expansion the Unicode Subcommittee flagged as missing coverage, and it sailed through approval with minimal controversy.
Design history
- 2018Tooth emoji approved in Unicode 11.0 and released in Emoji 11.0 on June 5, 2018.↗
- 2018Apple adds 🦷 in iOS 12.1, using a slightly yellow-tinted premolar. Google ships it in Android 9.0 Pie with a cooler white-blue tone.↗
- 2020Windows picks up 🦷 in the Fluent redesign after years of missing support. The late arrival made Microsoft one of the last major platforms to render it.↗
- 2021Tooth-gem TikToks cross 54 million views under #toothgems. 🦷 becomes the default caption emoji for the Y2K smile-jewelry revival.↗
- 2024Delta Dental's annual Tooth Fairy Poll reports the per-tooth rate dropped to $5.84, a 6% decline and the first dip in years.↗
Around the world
France, Belgium, Switzerland, Luxembourg
There's no Tooth Fairy. It's La Petite Souris, a tooth mouse. The tradition traces back to Marie-Catherine d'Aulnoy's 1697 fairy tale La Bonne Petite Souris, in which a fairy transforms into a mouse to sneak teeth from under a king's pillow. The mouse, not a fairy, is what kids text about with 🦷🐭.
Spain, Argentina, most of Latin America
Ratoncito Pérez, a tooth-collecting mouse named in an 1894 story by Luis Coloma, written for young King Alfonso XIII. Argentine kids drop teeth in a glass of water instead of under a pillow so the Ratón has something to drink on the way.
Japan, China, Korea, Vietnam, parts of India
Lower teeth are thrown onto the roof; upper teeth buried under the house or into the ground. The superstition: the new tooth will grow in straight, pulled toward the thrown direction. 🦷 gets used in parenting posts with 🏠 or 🌳.
Middle East (Iraq, Jordan, Egypt, Sudan)
Kids toss baby teeth toward the sun while asking for a better, brighter replacement. The practice predates Islam and has been documented as far back as the 13th century.
Mali
Kids throw baby teeth into the chicken coop in exchange for a chicken the next day. Higher-stakes than a dollar under a pillow.
South Africa (Afrikaans-speaking families)
The Tandemuis (tooth mouse) leaves money in a shoe, not under a pillow. The shoe detail turns up in a lot of 🦷👟 combo posts.
Not officially. People combine 🦷 with 🧚 (Fairy, added in Unicode 11.0 the same year). In France and Spain-speaking countries the tradition is a tooth mouse, so you'll sometimes see 🦷🐭 instead.
In the US, Delta Dental's 2024 poll reported an average of $5.84 per lost tooth, down from $6.23 the prior year. First lost teeth averaged $7.09. Payouts are higher in the West ($8.54) than the South ($5.51).
Tooth Fairy payouts by US region (2024)
Often confused with
🪥 is the toothbrush, added in Unicode 13.0 (2020). If the message is about brushing, flossing, or bathroom routine, 🪥 is the better pick. 🦷 is the object of the brushing.
🪥 is the toothbrush, added in Unicode 13.0 (2020). If the message is about brushing, flossing, or bathroom routine, 🪥 is the better pick. 🦷 is the object of the brushing.
🦴 is a dog-cartoon bone, not a human skeletal bone. Both emojis arrived in Emoji 11.0 (2018) as part of the same body-parts expansion. People sometimes pick 🦴 thinking it's generically "hard white body thing," but for teeth use 🦷.
🦴 is a dog-cartoon bone, not a human skeletal bone. Both emojis arrived in Emoji 11.0 (2018) as part of the same body-parts expansion. People sometimes pick 🦴 thinking it's generically "hard white body thing," but for teeth use 🦷.
🦷 is the tooth; 🪥 is the toothbrush (added in Unicode 13.0, two years later). If your message is about the routine ("brushed my teeth 🪥") pick the toothbrush. If it's about the tooth itself — pain, fairy, gem, whitening — pick 🦷.
Caption ideas
Fun facts
- •🦷 arrived in Emoji 11.0 on June 5, 2018, the same batch as 🥵, 🥳, 🦞, and 🦸.
- •Untreated tooth decay is the most common health condition on Earth. The WHO estimates 2.5 billion people live with untreated caries in their permanent teeth.
- •The US spent $189 billion on dental care in 2024, a 3.6% real-terms increase over 2023. About 38.9% of that came out of pocket.
- •Children have 20 primary teeth; adults typically have 32, though a growing number of people are born missing one or more wisdom teeth entirely. Modern diets are slowly selecting them out.
- •Tooth adornment is ancient. The Etruscans drilled gold into teeth around 800 BC; the Maya inlaid jade and turquoise; both predate the grillz revival by roughly three thousand years.
- •The Tooth Fairy as a named character first appears in print in a 1908 "Household Hints" column in the Chicago Daily Tribune. The tooth-mouse predates her by over two centuries.
- •Microsoft was notably late to 🦷: Windows 10 shipped without support until a late 2019 update rolled it into the Fluent-style set. For a year and a half, emails with 🦷 showed a hollow box on Windows machines.
- •There is no skin-tone variant for 🦷. Unicode treats it as an object, not a body part of a specific person.
In pop culture
- •Nelly, Paul Wall, Big Gipp and Ali's 2005 #1 single "Grillz") pushed diamond-teeth imagery into mainstream pop culture. 🦷 is now the default caption for grillz content decades later.
- •Netflix's Sweet Tooth (2021–2024) put the idiom into a three-season fantasy show. The 🦷🍬 combo trended during each season premiere.
- •Post Malone's 12-carat diamond fang implants reignited the grillz conversation in 2023 and gave 🦷💎 a clear celebrity anchor.
- •TikTok's "wisdom-teeth anesthesia" genre (the "tell my crush I love him" format) turned 🦷😵💫 into one of the platform's most-used post-op caption combos.
Trivia
For developers
- •🦷 is . Shortcodes: on Slack, Discord, and GitHub.
- •No skin-tone variants. Unicode classifies it under but as an object, not a person modifier.
- •Lives in the Supplemental Symbols and Pictographs block (–), alongside the Emoji 11.0 body-parts expansion (🦴 bone, 🦵 leg, 🦶 foot).
- •Microsoft shipped a hollow-box fallback for over a year after 11.0. If you're supporting very old Windows email clients, keep a PNG fallback for 🦷.
Unicode approved it in Unicode 11.0 in February 2018, and it shipped as part of Emoji 11.0 on June 5, 2018. It filled a body-parts gap alongside 🦴 (bone), 🦵 (leg), and 🦶 (foot).
Unicode doesn't specify which tooth vendors should depict, but every major platform (Apple, Google, Samsung, Microsoft, Twitter) converged on a premolar: the two-cusped tooth between the canines and molars. It reads cleanly at tiny sizes, which is why it probably won out over molars or canines.
See the full Emoji Developer Tools guide for regex patterns, encoding helpers, and more.
When do you actually use 🦷?
Select all that apply
- Tooth Emoji (Emojipedia) (emojipedia.org)
- Unicode 11.0 Emoji List (unicode.org)
- Delta Dental 2024 Tooth Fairy Poll (deltadental.com)
- Tooth Fairy (Wikipedia) (en.wikipedia.org)
- WHO Oral Health Fact Sheet (who.int)
- ADA National Dental Expenses (ada.org)
- Tooth gems resurge on TikTok (i-D) (i-d.co)
- Grills in hip-hop (Highsnobiety) (highsnobiety.com)
- Diamond grillz history (Natural Diamonds) (naturaldiamonds.com)
- La Petite Souris (Obviously French) (obviouslyfrench.com)
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