Zipper-mouth Face Emoji

A yellow face with wide eyes and a silver zipper pulled shut across its mouth. 🤐 says one thing clearly: "I'm not talking." People use it when they're keeping a secret, promising not to spill, or pointedly refusing to comment on something. The phrase it replaces in text is "my lips are sealed," and that's exactly how most people read it.

But there's a second, less obvious use. 🤐 also works as a self-imposed gag, a way of saying "I'll shut up now" after realizing you've said too much, or "I have opinions but I'm choosing not to share them." That second meaning is where it gets interesting in group chats and workplace Slack channels. Sending 🤐 after someone drops gossip is a promise of confidentiality. Sending 🤐 after a heated argument is closer to the silent treatment. Same emoji, different energy, and the people around you will read it based on context.

Ranks 314th overall and 9th in the face-neutral-skeptical subcategory. Not a top-100 emoji, but it fills a specific niche that no other emoji covers as well.

It's also, as of 2020, the first single emoji that an English-speaking court found capable of defaming someone on its own. In Burrows v Houda (NSW District Court, Australia), Justice Judith Gibson ruled that a lone 🤐 posted in reply to "what happened to her since?" could carry the defamatory meaning that the poster knew something damaging but was forbidden from saying it. The court cited Emojipedia as authority. The ruling is now studied in law schools from Sydney to Pretoria. If you're inclined to drop 🤐 under a tweet about a professional you dislike, you are, very literally, making a statement.

On Twitter/X, 🤐 shows up in quote tweets where people want to comment but can't (or shouldn't). Politicians, journalists, and corporate accounts use it when they're bound by embargoes, NDAs, or just good judgment. In personal texting, it's the go-to response when a friend says "don't tell anyone but..." and you want to confirm you'll keep quiet.

On Slack and Teams, 🤐 has become an informal signal for "I know something but I'm not authorized to share it yet." Product launches, layoffs, reorgs: if someone reacts with 🤐 in a work channel, everyone reads the subtext. It's the emoji equivalent of a knowing look across the conference table.

On TikTok and Instagram, it appears in captions about secrets, NDAs, and "things I can't say" content. Less common than 🤫 for secret-related posts because 🤫 has a more playful, teasing energy while 🤐 feels more permanent and serious.

🤐 came from a practical need. Before 2015, there was no face emoji that communicated "I'm keeping my mouth shut." You had 🤫 (well, not yet, that came in 2018), you had 😶 (face without mouth), but nothing that conveyed the active choice of staying silent. The zipper was the missing piece.

The emoji was proposed in L2/14-284R, a 2014 Unicode document titled "Emoji-System Compatibility Additions." The proposal listed its emoticon predecessors as :-X:-X and :-#:-#, both of which represented sealed or covered lips in early internet chat. Those text-based faces go back to the 1990s, when :-X:-X on IRC and AIM meant "my lips are sealed" or "I won't say."

The zipper motif was chosen over other options (tape, stitches, a hand) because zippers are reversible. A zipper can be opened. That subtle design choice matters: 🤐 implies the person could talk but is choosing not to. It's restraint, not inability. Compare that to 😶 (face without mouth), which suggests having nothing to say rather than holding something back.

Approved in Unicode 8.0 and released in 2015 as part of Emoji 1.0. Google had an interesting overlap: their Hushed Face 😯 previously featured a zipper-mouth design, which they had to change in Android 6.0.1 to avoid confusion with the newly standardized 🤐.

The visual gag itself is much older than the emoji. Mid-century Looney Tunes shorts used the "invisible zipper" trick: a character drags two fingers across the air as if closing a zipper, and the victim's mouth snaps shut and stays that way. TV Tropes files it under Wipe That Smile Off Your Face. Unicode didn't invent 🤐. They digitized something kids had already seen in cartoons for sixty years, which is partly why the gesture reads instantly across cultures.

Approved in Unicode 8.0 (2015) as U+1F910U+1F910 ZIPPER-MOUTH FACE. Added to Emoji 1.0. Part of the Smileys & Emotion category, face-neutral-skeptical subcategory. CLDR short name: "zipper-mouth face." Keywords: face, mouth, zipper.

1. 2014Proposed in L2/14-284R as an emoji-system compatibility addition, citing :-X and :-# as text predecessors↗
2. 2015Approved in Unicode 8.0 and Emoji 1.0 as U+1F910 ZIPPER-MOUTH FACE↗
3. 2015Apple implements in iOS 9.1 for Yahoo Messenger compatibility↗
4. 2015Google redesigns Hushed Face 😯 to remove its zipper-mouth design, avoiding confusion with the new 🤐↗
5. 2020Burrows v Houda: NSW District Court rules 🤐 can be defamatory on its own, first Australian emoji-defamation case↗

• •The Unicode proposal that introduced 🤐 (L2/14-284R) lists :-X:-X and :-#:-# as its emoticon ancestors, directly connecting it to the 1990s text chat tradition of sealed-lips faces.
• •Google's Hushed Face 😯 originally had a zipper-mouth design on Android. When 🤐 was standardized in 2015, Google had to redesign 😯 to avoid having two zipper-mouth emojis.
• •🤐 ranks 9th out of 16 emojis in the face-neutral-skeptical subcategory, sitting between 🤥 lying face and 😶 face without mouth.
• •The emoji's popularity spiked noticeably in March 2020, coinciding with the early COVID-19 lockdowns when people were processing a lot of uncertain news they couldn't fully discuss publicly.
• •Apple implemented 🤐 in iOS 9.1 specifically for Yahoo Messenger compatibility. Yahoo had been using a zipper-mouth emoticon in their messaging platform for years before Unicode standardized it.
• •In Burrows v Houda (2020), an Australian court relied on an Emojipedia entry as a dictionary definition when deciding what 🤐 meant. Peer-reviewed law journal articles now cite Emojipedia URLs as authoritative sources. The emoji dictionary sits on the same shelf as Black's Law Dictionary, in at least one jurisdiction.
• •The Unicode Consortium's published frequency methodology groups emojis into buckets, each roughly half as common as the one above. 🤐 lives several buckets below 😂, which means for every single 🤐 posted globally, hundreds of 😂s go up in the same minute. A niche tool for a specific situation, not an everyday reach.
• •Japanese manga beat Unicode to the zipper-mouth design by nearly a decade. Oda's CP9 agent Fukurou, introduced in One Piece around 2006, wears a literal zipper he chooses to ignore. The irony is the joke: the character who most ostentatiously promises silence can't actually keep it.

• •Using 🤐 during an argument can read as the silent treatment rather than thoughtful restraint. If you mean "I need time to think," say that. If you just send 🤐, the other person will assume you're shutting them out.
• •In group chats, reacting with 🤐 to gossip about someone who's in the chat creates immediate paranoia. Everyone wonders what you know and whether it involves them.
• •Sending 🤐 in response to someone sharing good news reads as withholding or jealous. Save it for actual secret-keeping situations.

• •The Matrix (1999) has one of cinema's most unsettling silence scenes: Agent Smith says "What good is a phone call if you are unable to speak?" and Neo's mouth seals itself shut, skin growing over where his lips were. The closest live-action equivalent to what 🤐 represents.
• •In Saw IV (2007), the opening mausoleum trap has one victim with his eyes sewn shut and the other with his mouth sewn shut, forced to cooperate without being able to communicate. The mouth-sewn-shut trope became a horror staple after this franchise.
• •Ma (2019) features Octavia Spencer's character sewing a teenager's lips closed while she's drugged, which went viral as one of the most disturbing scenes in modern horror.
• •The "mouth sewn shut" trope on IMDB has its own keyword page with dozens of horror films, making 🤐 an accidental horror emoji for anyone who's seen those movies.
• •One Piece's CP9 assassin Fukurou (introduced in 2006) has a literal zipper across his mouth, which he keeps open most of the time because he cannot stop gossiping. Eiichiro Oda drew the gag years before 🤐 was standardized. Manga readers who saw the emoji in 2015 recognized it instantly, which partly explains 🤐's strong early uptake in Japanese Twitter.
• •The classic cartoon version is older still. Looney Tunes shorts used the "invisible zipper" gag from at least the 1940s: a character draws fingers across the air and the victim's mouth snaps shut. TV Tropes catalogs this under Wipe That Smile Off Your Face. 🤐 is the gag compressed into one codepoint.

• •U+1F910U+1F910. No variation selector needed.
• •On Slack: :zipper_mouth_face::zipper_mouth_face:. On GitHub: :zipper_mouth_face::zipper_mouth_face:. On Discord: :zipper_mouth_face::zipper_mouth_face:.
• •The emoji renders consistently across all modern platforms. Older Samsung devices (pre-Experience 8.1) have a slightly different zipper style but the meaning is clear.
• •If building a content moderation or silence-related feature, 🤐 is a natural icon choice for "muted" or "redacted" states.

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