Umbrella With Rain Drops Emoji

An umbrella with raindrops actively falling on it. ☔ is the weather-in-progress umbrella, the one that says 'it is literally raining right now.' Approved in Unicode 4.0 (April 2003) as U+2614U+2614 UMBRELLA WITH RAIN DROPS, a full decade before most people owned a smartphone.

Unlike ☂️ (which can be metaphorical) or 🌂 (which implies the rain has stopped), ☔ is unambiguous about the weather. If you send ☔, you're saying rain is happening, was just happening, or is about to. It's the go-to emoji for rainy-day selfies, 'reminder to bring a jacket' texts, and the 'perfect weather to stay in bed' vibe.

☔ also carries one of emoji's most specific pop culture associations: Rihanna's 'Umbrella' (2007)). The song spent 10 consecutive weeks at UK #1), the longest run of the 2000s, during one of the wettest British summers on record, and the 'ella, ella, ella' hook is now so embedded in culture that any umbrella emoji can be a musical callback. ☔ tends to get tagged in Rihanna tribute threads specifically, since it shows the rain the song is about.

☔ dominates weather posts during rainy seasons. Peak usage: Q3 in East and Southeast Asia (monsoon), late autumn in Western Europe, and any week the Pacific Northwest remembers it's the Pacific Northwest. The Meltwater 2024 report shows weather emojis spike 3-5x during actual rain events, people post about the weather they're experiencing.

On TikTok, ☔ often frames cozy-indoor content: rain sounds, tea, study-with-me videos, 'rainy-day playlist' recommendations. The rain-on-umbrella visual has been a shorthand for 'cozy melancholy' since at least the mid-2010s.

The pop-culture layer is thick. Rihanna's Navy drops ☔ in her mentions and comment threads. ☔🎵 is instant recognition. Swifties have their own umbrella reference via 'Fearless' ('it's a two-AM, slamming doors instead of kissing goodnight'), but ☔ is primarily Rihanna territory.

U+2614U+2614 was approved as part of Unicode 4.0 in April 2003, which added 1,226 characters including several now-ubiquitous weather emojis. Like its sibling ☂️ (added a decade earlier in Unicode 1.1), ☔ was imported from Japanese character sets like JIS X 0208, which had a rich weather-symbol vocabulary used in TV forecasts, newspapers, and early Japanese mobile pictograms.

In Japanese weather forecasting convention, a circled rain-drop or umbrella-with-drops has long stood for 'rainy.' When Unicode standardised these for interoperability between Japanese carriers in the early 2000s, ☔ came along for the ride. It sat as a plain text symbol for years before iOS 5 (2011) turned it into a proper emoji, and Emoji 1.0 (2015) formalised its status.

The visual design has shifted dramatically across vendors. Apple draws ☔ in violet-purple, WhatsApp famously uses green, Mozilla uses pink, and Samsung and Google go blue. This makes ☔ one of the most chromatically inconsistent emojis, there's no 'correct' umbrella colour.

1. 2003U+2614 UMBRELLA WITH RAIN DROPS approved in Unicode 4.0, imported from Japanese weather-symbol tradition.↗
2. 2007Rihanna releases 'Umbrella' in March. Spends 10 weeks at UK #1 during the UK's wettest summer on record.↗
3. 2011Apple ships emoji keyboard on iOS 5, making ☔ widely accessible to non-Japanese users.
4. 2015Emoji 1.0 standardises ☔ across vendors. Colour interpretations diverge (violet on Apple, green on WhatsApp, pink on Mozilla).↗
5. 2024Rihanna's 'Umbrella' certified 4x Platinum by the BPI for 2.4M units in the UK.↗

• •Rihanna's 'Umbrella') spent 10 consecutive weeks at UK #1) in 2007, the longest run of any single that decade. The song coincided with the UK's wettest summer on record, and British tabloids jokingly credited Rihanna with causing the rain.
• •☔ was approved in Unicode 4.0 in 2003, over 20 years ago. It's older than Facebook, the iPhone, and most emoji people think of as 'classic.'
• •WhatsApp is the only major platform that renders ☔ in green. Apple uses violet, Google and Samsung use blue, Mozilla uses pink. There's no official colour in the Unicode spec.
• •The song 'Umbrella' was offered first to Britney Spears and Mary J. Blige), both of whom passed. Rihanna recorded it third, and it became the second-biggest-selling single of 2007 worldwide.
• •In Japanese weather forecasts, the umbrella icon has stood for 'rainy' since long before emoji. NHK's rain symbol is a near-identical visual to ☔, and the emoji was essentially digitised from this tradition.
• •India's monsoon (monsoon onset in early June) is one of the most tracked weather events on social media globally. Indian users post ☔ as the monsoon progresses north, creating a wave of geo-tagged rain emojis that follows the storm system.
• •Songxia, China produces most of the world's umbrellas, including the cheap disposable ones you buy at convenience stores in any rainy city.