Toothbrush Emoji

A plastic-handled toothbrush, usually shown from the side with white bristles and a colored grip. Most people use 🪥 literally: morning routine, night routine, dentist appointment, the sad moment you realize you forgot to pack one. But the emoji carries a second life as a relationship tell. Keeping a toothbrush at someone's place is the quiet version of planting a flag, and the emoji lets people joke about that milestone without saying the scary word 'commitment.' It also works as a gentle dig ('🪥 maybe?') when a friend's breath is suspect, or as shorthand for any routine worth doing twice a day.

The emoji is newer than the routine it depicts by about 5,400 years. Babylonian chew sticks date to around 3500 BCE, the first bristle toothbrush appeared in Tang Dynasty China (619 to 907 CE), and William Addis mass-produced the first modern version in 1780. The emoji only arrived in 2020, after a proposal from Emojination noted that dental hygiene deserved its own glyph rather than the workaround of using 🦷.

On TikTok and Instagram, 🪥 is a staple of the 'that girl' morning routine genre alongside 💧 🧘 🥛 ☀️. In that context it's scenery, one beat in a montage of ceramic tiles, marble counters, and pastel dispensers. On X and dating apps the emoji gets more loaded. 'Moved my 🪥 in' is a whole genre of post about relationship escalation, and 'did she leave her 🪥 here?' is a running bit about suspicious partners. The emoji had a moment on TikTok in 2023 when the Ginny & Georgia toothbrush scene went viral, with one reaction edit hitting 1.7 million likes and the comment 'toothbrushes are made for your teeth Ginny' becoming its own meme. Gen Z uses 🪥 earnestly in skincare-adjacent routine posts. Older users stick to the literal 'brushing teeth' meaning and rarely reach for the flirty subtext.

The toothbrush emoji was one of 217 new emojis approved in Emoji 13.0 on January 29, 2020. The proposal, filed as L2/19-153, came from Callum Ponton, Maya Knell, Samantha Sunne, and Jennifer 8. Lee, the journalist and Emojination co-founder behind many successful emoji campaigns (including 🧋 bubble tea and 🥟 dumpling).

The pitch was surprisingly hard to argue with: dental care is a near-universal human activity, toothbrushes appear in toothpaste ads, dental-office branding, children's books, and countless household routines, and there was no good emoji shortcut for 'brush your teeth.' People had been using 🦷 or 🚿 as awkward stand-ins. The proposal also pointed out that most major hygiene objects already had glyphs (🛁 bathtub arrived in 2010, 🚿 shower in 2010) but the object you use twice a day did not. Unicode agreed, and 🪥 shipped alongside its bathroom cousins 🧴 lotion bottle and 🪒 razor, the full 'sink counter starter pack' rounded out in a single release.

1. 2019Proposal L2/19-153 submitted to Unicode by Emojination team (Jennifer 8. Lee et al.)↗
2. 2020Approved in Unicode 13.0 and Emoji 13.0 on January 29, 2020 as U+1FAA5↗
3. 2020Apple shipped on iOS 14.2 in November 2020 with a detailed blue-handled brush↗
4. 2020Google Noto added a minimalist teal-green version on Android 11.0↗
5. 2020Samsung One UI 2.5 shipped a blue-green toothbrush with white paste on the bristles↗

Outside the West, the toothbrush emoji sometimes competes with a much older symbol. The miswak, a chewing stick made from the Salvadora persica tree, has been used for oral hygiene for thousands of years across the Middle East, North Africa, and parts of Asia. The World Health Organization recommended miswak as an effective tool for oral hygiene in 1986, and it remains common in Saudi Arabia, Pakistan, Sudan, and Indonesia. There's no miswak emoji, so users in those regions either adopt 🪥 for the concept or skip the object entirely and use 🦷.

Japan has its own vocabulary around the ritual. The Japanese word for the traditional chewing stick is koyoji, though modern Japan is firmly in the plastic-and-electric-brush camp and was one of the early adopters of sonic toothbrush technology. In South Korea, twice-daily brushing is less common than the '3-3-3' rule (brush within 3 minutes after eating, for 3 minutes, 3 times a day), and the emoji appears often in K-beauty morning routine posts that tend to run much longer than Western equivalents.

• •The first mass-produced toothbrush was invented in 1780 by William Addis while he was imprisoned in Newgate Prison). He drilled holes in a cattle bone, pushed boar bristles through, and glued them in place. His company still exists.
• •The first bristle toothbrush, per the Library of Congress, came from Tang Dynasty China between 619 and 907 CE, made from hog hair from Siberia and northern China where the cold climate produced stiffer bristles.
• •The global electric toothbrush market was valued at $4.36 billion in 2024 and is forecast to reach roughly $9 billion by 2030. Rotating models still hold 58.1% share despite the rise of sonic competitors.
• •Despite the electric boom, 64% of Americans still use a manual toothbrush according to YouGov. Only 23% use a conventional electric, and disposable electrics and ultrasonic models each sit around 4%.
• •Roughly 23% of Americans admit to having gone two or more days without brushing their teeth. The most common reason is being too tired at night.
• •The Unicode proposal for 🪥 was co-authored by Jennifer 8. Lee, the journalist and Emojination co-founder whose other successful proposals include 🧋 bubble tea, 🥟 dumpling, and 🧕 person with headscarf.
• •Philips's top-end Sonicare models claim up to 30x more plaque removal than a manual brush in hard-to-reach areas. Whether that shows up in your mouth depends on how long you actually brush.
• •In Islamic tradition, the miswak (a chewing stick from the Salvadora persica tree) is the traditional oral hygiene tool. The WHO endorsed it in 1986. It's called siwak in Arabic, koyoji in Japanese, qesam in Hebrew.

• •Ginny and Georgia (Netflix, 2021): the Season 1, Episode 3 toothbrush scene became one of the most meme'd moments of the show on TikTok, spawning years of reaction content.
• •Nylon, 'The Truth Of What A Toothbrush Represents In Modern Dating' (2016): Beca Grimm's essay framed the left-behind toothbrush as a relationship milestone and shaped how the emoji now gets used in dating content.
• •Oral-B's 'Indicator' brush line: the color-fade bristle trick (bristles lose their color when it's time to replace) turned the toothbrush itself into a piece of interactive design, which is why dental offices still hand them out as patient favorites.