Woman’s Hat Emoji

A wide-brimmed straw hat with a ribbon or bow tied around the crown. 👒 is the "woman's hat" in Unicode, but the image it calls up is more specific: the floppy garden hat, the Royal Ascot fascinator, the Kentucky Derby show-stopper, the cottagecore Pinterest aesthetic. It's a sun-protection tool that accidentally became shorthand for femininity, summer, and dressed-up leisure.

Where 🧢 says casual and 🎩 says formal-but-masculine, 👒 sits in its own slot: formal-but-soft, romantic, deliberately feminine. Emojipedia describes it as a "hat worn by women for sun protection or for fashion." The straw-and-ribbon design is near-universal across platforms, even when the ribbon color changes (green on Apple, purple on Google, red in earlier versions, flower-trimmed on old Twitter).

The emoji was approved as part of Unicode 6.0 in 2010 under the name "WOMANS HAT" at codepoint U+1F452U+1F452. Like most of the original emoji set, it came from the Japanese mobile carrier catalogs that Apple incorporated into iOS, shipping first on the iPhone in Japan in 2008 before going global with iOS 5 in 2011.

👒 is a seasonal, aesthetic emoji. It shows up in three recurring contexts.

Summer and vacation. Beach trips, poolside selfies, garden photos, picnic setups. 👒🌞 and 👒🌸 are the most common combos. Often paired with sunglasses, beach, or cocktail emojis.

Dressed-up daytime events. Royal Ascot, Kentucky Derby, Melbourne Cup, spring weddings, Easter brunches, garden parties. These events have actual hat-wearing rules, the Royal Ascot Royal Enclosure requires a hat with at least a 4-inch base, and 👒 is the default emoji for captioning the outfit.

Cottagecore and romantic aesthetic. On TikTok, Instagram, and Pinterest, 👒 tags into the cottagecore visual vocabulary alongside linen, lace, daisies, and picnics. Straw hats are a core cottagecore signifier; the emoji rides along with that whole aesthetic umbrella.

Unlike 🧢 (slang for lying) or 🎩 (ironic "tips fedora" meme), 👒 has no dominant slang meaning. It's used earnestly almost every time.

👒 isn't a Western invention. Like most of the original emoji set, it came from the late-1990s Japanese mobile carrier catalogs, SoftBank, DoCoMo, and KDDI each shipped their own picture alphabets, and the woman's hat appeared in those lists as part of general fashion iconography. When Apple brought emoji to the iPhone's Japanese launch in 2008, 👒 came along.

The Unicode Consortium absorbed the carrier sets in Unicode 6.0 (2010) under the name "WOMANS HAT" and assigned it U+1F452U+1F452. It was later added to Emoji 1.0 in 2015 when the first official emoji standard formalized the set.

The specific visual, wide brim, straw, ribbon, is a stylized version of the floppy garden hat that became culturally dominant in women's summer fashion through the 20th century. The Apple design uses a green bow. Google shows a purple ribbon (it used to be red before their 2017 redesign). Twitter's early version had a flower on the front, which carried over into Twemoji.

1. 1998Appears in early Japanese mobile carrier emoji catalogs as part of fashion iconography.
2. 2008Ships with the iPhone in Japan as part of Apple's Japanese emoji set.
3. 2010Approved by the Unicode Consortium as part of Unicode 6.0, codepoint U+1F452, name 'WOMANS HAT'.
4. 2015Added to Emoji 1.0 when the first official emoji standard formalized the Unicode set.
5. 2017Google changed its ribbon color from red to purple in the Noto Color Emoji redesign.

• •Queen Elizabeth II's personal hat collection reportedly numbered around 5,000 pieces. Her June Ascot hats were an annual fashion news cycle.
• •The Kentucky Derby hat tradition was started by Col. Meriwether Lewis Clark Jr. in 1875, who modeled the race after British horse racing. Hats were originally just what women wore to any formal event; they survived at the Derby after becoming tradition for tradition's sake.
• •Royal Ascot's first dress code was written in 1807 by Beau Brummell, the Regency dandy and close friend of the future King George IV. The current Royal Enclosure rule requires hats with at least a 4-inch base, and stewards carry measuring tapes.
• •Apple's 👒 has a green bow. Google's had a red ribbon until 2017, when Google's Noto Color Emoji redesign switched it to purple. Twitter's original design had a flower on the front instead of a ribbon.
• •The "woman's hat" in Unicode is technically just one of many hat emojis, but it's the only one explicitly gendered in its Unicode name. 🎩, 🧢, and 🎓 are not gendered; 👒 and 🤠 are the only ones with strong gender associations.
• •Royal Ascot was established in 1711 by Queen Anne. The tradition of flamboyant Ascot hats dates back to the early 19th century, making 👒 one of the few emojis with a direct line to 300-year-old British society events.