Wind Face Emoji

A blue, personified cloud-face blowing wind sideways, usually puffed cheeks and an open mouth. 🌬️ is one of the few weather emojis with a face, which puts it in a different register from the rest of the forecast icons. It's wind with intention.

The motif is old. Aeolus), the Greek keeper of the winds, and the four Anemoi (Boreas, Notus, Eurus, Zephyrus) personified wind as gods with specific personalities. Renaissance cartographers drew the same puffing faces at the edges of their maps. The Carta Marina of 1539 has at least a dozen of them. 🌬️ is the digital heir to 500 years of "wind has a face" art.

In modern texting, the emoji does more than weather. Wellness and meditation accounts use it for breath work. Sailors and kiteboarders use it for wind condition reports. Autumn-aesthetic accounts use it with falling leaves. Occasionally, jokers use it as the "Mother Nature farted" emoji, though 💨 does that job more reliably. The face makes it playful, mythic, and slightly too cute for serious severe weather, which is why strong-wind warnings default to 🌪️ or 🌀.

Approved in Unicode 7.0 (2014) as U+1F32C WIND FACE.

Four main registers:

Literal wind. Weather complaints, autumn foliage posts, rooftop-umbrella-flipping videos, wildfire red-flag warnings, and reporters getting blown sideways during coastal live shots. 🌬️ is a natural caption for anything kinetic in the sky.

Breathing and mindfulness. Yoga, meditation, and therapy-adjacent accounts use 🌬️ for exhales, box breathing, nervous-system regulation. "Inhale 🌊 exhale 🌬️" or "big breath out 🌬️" is routine on wellness TikTok.

Wind sports and sailing. Kiteboarders, windsurfers, paragliders, and sailors track wind reports compulsively and use 🌬️ as a shorthand for "conditions are good." Racing classes like Olympic sailing sometimes caption race-day posts with it.

Renewable energy. With wind now providing about 12% of global electricity, 🌬️ has drifted into clean-energy and climate content. Offshore wind farms, turbine installation clips, and policy posts use it as a soft branding mark.

One thing 🌬️ almost never does: flirty. The face is too goofy and the association too literal.

🌬️ was part of the L2/11-052 emoji ad-hoc proposal that added the detailed weather set in Unicode 7.0. The name in the proposal was "WIND BLOWING FACE," later simplified to "WIND FACE" in Unicode 8.0. The design brief explicitly referenced Renaissance map cartouches, which is why almost every vendor renders it with puffed cheeks and a side-blowing mouth.

The cultural source is much older. The Greeks named four wind gods (the Anemoi): Boreas the north, Zephyrus the west, Notus the south, Eurus the east. Each had a personality. Boreas was cold and brutal; Zephyrus was gentle and favorable; Notus brought storms; Eurus was unpredictable. Medieval and Renaissance cartographers inherited this tradition and drew wind gods puffing across the oceans of their maps. The 1539 Carta Marina and the 1570 Theatrum Orbis Terrarum both feature them.

The emoji compresses that 2,500-year image tradition into a 72px glyph. It's one of the oldest motifs in the entire Unicode set.

1. -800Greek mythology personifies wind as the Anemoi, four gods with distinct personalities.
2. 1539Olaus Magnus's Carta Marina features a dozen personified wind faces blowing across the northern oceans.↗
3. 1805Sir Francis Beaufort devises the Beaufort wind force scale for the Royal Navy, 0 calm to 12 hurricane.↗
4. 1945Antarctic explorers Paul Siple and Charles Passel formalize the wind chill concept.
5. 2001Modern wind chill index revised by the US National Weather Service.
6. 2011Unicode Emoji Ad-Hoc Committee proposes WIND BLOWING FACE in L2/11-052.↗
7. 2014Unicode 7.0 approves U+1F32C. Renamed simply WIND FACE in 8.0.↗
8. 2015Apple, Google, Samsung, Microsoft all render the emoji in Emoji 1.0.

• •The windiest place on Earth is Commonwealth Bay in East Antarctica, which regularly sees gusts over 150 mph thanks to katabatic winds pouring off the ice sheet. The average annual wind speed is about 50 mph.
• •Wellington, New Zealand, is the windiest capital city in the world with an average annual wind speed of 17.5 mph and a record gust of 154 mph. Kiwis have a whole vocabulary for their wind.
• •The Beaufort Scale describes wind by what it does to the sea, not just its speed. Force 8 is "twigs broken off trees, impedes walking." Force 12 is "devastation." It's been in use since 1805.
• •The four Greek wind gods, the Anemoi, each had personalities: Boreas was cold and brutal; Zephyrus gentle and favorable; Notus brought storms; Eurus was unpredictable. Sailors prayed to the specific one for their direction.
• •Wind now provides about 12% of global electricity, with total installed capacity at 1,346 GW at the end of 2025. China accounts for roughly 77% of new installations.
• •Fujin, the Japanese wind god, is typically depicted carrying a bag of wind across his shoulders. Fujin-Raijin (wind and thunder) pairings are a classic motif in Edo-period Japanese screens.
• •Wind chill was formalized in 1945 by Antarctic explorers Paul Siple and Charles Passel, who measured how fast water froze in different wind conditions. The modern wind chill index was revised in 2001.
• •Chicago earned the nickname "Windy City" in the 1870s, but not for weather. The original slur accused Chicago boosters of being full of hot air in their competition to host the 1893 World's Fair. The actual wind there averages 10 mph, less than Boston or New York.