Woman: Curly Hair Emoji

The woman with curly hair emoji shows a female face with curly or coiled hair. It was part of a 2018 push to bring hair diversity to emoji, alongside options for red hair, white hair, and baldness. For many users, especially Black women, it was the first emoji that came close to representing natural hair textures rather than the default straight, Eurocentric styles that had dominated emoji keyboards since the beginning.

In practice, 👩‍🦱 gets used to represent anyone with curly hair, regardless of race. It shows up in conversations about hair care routines, wash days, humidity struggles, and the eternal love-hate relationship with frizz. But its cultural significance runs deeper than aesthetics. The emoji became a flashpoint in a larger conversation about whose hair gets represented in digital communication, with many arguing it still doesn't go far enough.

On Instagram, 👩‍🦱 lives in curly hair appreciation posts, product reviews, and before-and-after styling reveals. The #curlyhair hashtag has billions of views across TikTok and Instagram, and the emoji is a staple in those spaces. Wash day content (the ritual of washing, conditioning, and styling curly hair) often uses it alongside 🧴 and 💆‍♀️.

There's also a TikTok phenomenon called "Hair Theory," which proposes that in movies and TV shows, when a female character falls in love, her hair returns to its natural curly state. The curly hair emoji gets pulled into those discussions as shorthand for "free, authentic, unbothered."

In dating contexts, it's a self-identifier. Someone with curly hair might use 👩‍🦱 in their bio to signal what they look like. It's also used when guessing who someone is ("was it the 👩‍🦱 at the coffee shop?").

Mostly neutral. It's a descriptive emoji, not an emotional one. The flirty potential comes from context: if someone is specifically describing you as 👩‍🦱 with heart eyes or fire emojis attached, that's attraction. On its own, it's just "woman with curly hair."

• •👩‍🦱🔥 or 👩‍🦱😍 after your photo? They're into the curls.
• •👩‍🦱 used to describe someone at an event? Just identification.
• •👩‍🦱💕 in someone's bio? Self-love, not directed at you.

Before 2018, every female emoji had the same straight hair. If you had curly, coily, or afro-textured hair, there was nothing on the keyboard that looked like you. The push for hair diversity started with Jeremy Burge's 2017 proposal suggesting new hair components for red, curly, white, and bald. Unicode accepted it, and the curly hair emoji shipped in Emoji 11.0 (2018).

But the celebration was short-lived for some. When the emoji launched, Refinery29 reported mixed reactions: people with loose curls felt represented, but those with tighter afro-textured hair that spirals upward and outward rather than hanging down felt the emoji missed the mark. In 2019, New York writer Rhianna Jones submitted a formal Unicode proposal for an afro emoji, backed by 65,000 petition signatures. Unicode declined it, stating the existing curly hair emoji was "sufficiently representative."

The pushback hasn't stopped. In 2025, Dove and RISE.365 launched a campaign calling for four new emoji hairstyles: afro, locs, braids, and cornrows. Their research found that 8 in 10 Black people in the U.S. struggle to find emojis that accurately depict their hair, and 57% report feeling undervalued because of this gap.

Added in Unicode 11.0 (2018), Emoji 11.0. This is a ZWJ sequence: U+1F469U+1F469 (Woman) + U+200DU+200D (Zero Width Joiner) + U+1F9B1U+1F9B1 (Curly Hair component). The curly hair component (U+1F9B1U+1F9B1) was the first "hair component" in Unicode, a new category created specifically for combining with person emojis to produce hair variation. Red hair, white hair, and bald components debuted alongside it.

1. 2017Jeremy Burge proposes hair components (curly, red, white, bald) for Unicode↗
2. 2018👩‍🦱 Woman: Curly Hair ships in Unicode 11.0, Emoji 11.0↗
3. 2018Apple adds curly hair emojis in iOS 12.1 (October)↗
4. 2019Rhianna Jones's afro emoji proposal with 65,000 signatures is declined by Unicode↗
5. 2025Dove and RISE.365 campaign for afro, locs, braids, and cornrow emojis↗

The curly hair emoji sits at the intersection of beauty standards and cultural identity. In many African and African diaspora communities, natural hair is a statement of cultural pride, tied to movements like the Natural Hair Movement that gained momentum in the 2000s-2010s. The CROWN Act (Creating a Respectful and Open World for Natural Hair), first passed in California in 2019 and now law in 26+ U.S. states, protects against hair discrimination. The emoji carries weight in that context: it's not just hair, it's representation.

In Latin America, curly and coily hair is celebrated in some communities but has also been subject to discrimination (the concept of "pelo malo" or "bad hair"). In South Asia, curly hair is less culturally loaded but still under-represented in beauty standards. The emoji gives visibility to textures that straight-hair-dominant cultures have historically marginalized.

• •The curly hair component 🦱 (U+1F9B1U+1F9B1) was the first "Emoji_Component" character for hair in Unicode history. Before 2018, hair was just whatever the base person emoji came with.
• •Rhianna Jones and designer Kerrilyn Gibson created an actual afro hair emoji prototype and submitted it to Unicode with 65,000 petition signatures. Unicode said no.
• •The CROWN Act, which protects against natural hair discrimination, has passed in 26+ U.S. states. The same cultural tension that drives the law also drives the push for better hair representation in emoji.
• •According to Dove's 2025 research, 57% of Black people report feeling undervalued due to lack of emoji hair representation.

• •Some users assume 👩‍🦱 represents all non-straight hair textures, but afro-textured hair that spirals upward and outward is distinct from curly hair that hangs down. This distinction matters to many Black users who feel the emoji doesn't represent them.
• •On older devices, the ZWJ sequence may not render as a single emoji. Recipients might see 👩🦱 (woman + curly hair component) displayed separately.

• •The Natural Hair Movement, which gained mainstream traction in the 2010s, encouraged Black women to embrace their natural hair textures instead of chemically straightening them. The curly hair emoji arrived as this movement was peaking.
• •TikTok's "Hair Theory" proposes that when female characters in movies find true love, their hair returns to its natural curly state, symbolizing freedom and authenticity. Think Mia Thermopolis in The Princess Diaries pre-makeover, or Brave's Merida refusing to tame her curls.
• •Dove's ongoing Code My Crown initiative campaigns for Black hairstyle emojis, making the 👩‍🦱 emoji part of a larger conversation about digital representation that extends beyond Unicode committees into consumer activism.

• •ZWJ sequence: U+1F469U+1F469 + U+200DU+200D + U+1F9B1U+1F9B1. The U+1F9B1U+1F9B1 curly hair component is an Emoji_Component character that doesn't render independently on most platforms.
• •Skin tone modifiers insert between the woman base and the ZWJ: U+1F469 U+1F3FB U+200D U+1F9B1U+1F469 U+1F3FB U+200D U+1F9B1 for light skin tone.
• •Shortcodes: :curly_haired_woman::curly_haired_woman: on GitHub and Slack. CLDR short name: woman: curly hairwoman: curly hair.
• •In JavaScript, '👩‍🦱'.length'👩‍🦱'.length returns 5 due to surrogate pairs for both the woman and curly hair codepoints plus the ZWJ. Use a grapheme segmenter for accurate character counting.

See the full Emoji Developer Tools guide for regex patterns, encoding helpers, and more.