Facepalm Emoji Emoji 🤦
Copy the facepalm emoji emoji 🤦 with one click, then explore the meaning and example uses below.
What does the facepalm emoji emoji mean?
A person with one hand covering their face, expressing frustration, embarrassment, or disbelief. Universal gesture of exasperation.
How to use 🤦
- Reacting to someone's mistake
- Expressing frustration or exasperation
- Showing embarrassment
- Reacting to an obvious error
- Conveying disbelief or disappointment
Facepalm Unicode and how it got added
🤦 Person Facepalming is U+1F926, approved in Unicode 9.0 (June 2016) — several years after Unicode's original 2010 emoji set. It exists because of a public push: Emojipedia co-founder Jeremy Burge and others submitted a formal proposal in 2015 after noticing 'facepalm' had become one of the most-requested missing emoji, driven partly by its use as a reaction meme (including the famous Star Trek 'Picard facepalm' image) long before an official glyph existed.
Facepalm variants
- Default 🤦: gender-neutral in the Unicode spec, rendered as male or a generic figure depending on vendor default.
- 🤦♂️ / 🤦♀️: explicit man/woman facepalming, built with a ZWJ (zero-width joiner) sequence plus the gender sign, added at emoji version 4.0.
- Skin tone modifiers: 🤦🏻 🤦🏼 🤦🏽 🤦🏾 🤦🏿 apply Fitzpatrick scale modifiers (U+1F3FB–U+1F3FF), same as most gesture emoji.
- Text alternative: the kaomoji (￣□￣;) or a plain not impressed face covers the same 'I can't believe this' tone in apps that don't render 🤦 well.
From an 1896 statue to a 2016 emoji: the facepalm timeline
- 1896: the pose itself predates the internet by over a century — Henri Vidal's statue 'Caïn', on display in Paris, depicts the same head-in-hand gesture.
- 2004: the earliest documented online use of the word appears on Urban Dictionary, defined by user 'Moondog' as dropping your face into your hand, often with a cry of 'D'oh!'.
- 1990 → 2007: Star Trek: The Next Generation's episode 'Deja Q' (aired February 5, 1990) shows Captain Picard performing the gesture; a YouTube clip of the moment, uploaded by Johan Jacobsen on May 21, 2007, drove much of the meme's early online spread and racked up nearly half a million views.
- 2005 / 2007 / 2008: Wiktionary added a formal definition in 2005, the domain facepalm.com was registered in 2007, and by 2008 major media outlets were using the Picard image as a standard reaction format.
- 2011: the Oxford English Dictionary formally added 'facepalm' as a word.
- 2016: Unicode finally gave the gesture its own emoji, 🤦, twelve years after the term first appeared online.
Platform render: iOS, Android, Windows and Slack
Because 🤦 is a full-body gesture rather than a simple face, vendor differences are more visible here than on smiley emoji: Apple renders a detailed, glossy figure with visible hand and hair shading, Google's Noto Emoji uses flatter, simpler shapes and colors, and Samsung's version has historically diverged the most in pose and proportions, though recent One UI updates narrowed that gap. Windows 11 splits the difference the same way it does for every emoji: a flat 2D 🤦 in the OS shell versus a glossier 3D 'Fluent' rendering inside Teams and Office. Slack shows Apple's version to Mac/iOS users and Google's Noto version to everyone else, since Apple's emoji artwork is proprietary and can't be embedded on non-Apple platforms.
Related searches
facepalm meme · person facepalming · picard facepalm · frustration emoji
FAQ
What does the facepalm emoji mean?
🤦 signals frustration, embarrassment or disbelief at someone's mistake — the digital equivalent of covering your face with your hand in exasperation.
Why wasn't there a facepalm emoji before 2016?
The original 2010 emoji set (Unicode 6.0) was built from a fixed list of existing Japanese carrier pictographs. 'Facepalm' wasn't among them, so it had to go through Unicode's formal new-emoji proposal process, which is why it, along with the shrug emoji, only arrived in 2016 as part of Unicode 9.0.
Where does the facepalm gesture come from?
The pose is far older than the internet — an 1896 Paris statue called 'Caïn' shows the same head-in-hand posture. Online, the term was first documented on Urban Dictionary in 2004, and the gesture went viral largely through a 2007 YouTube clip of Captain Picard performing it in a 1990 Star Trek: The Next Generation episode.
Is there a gender-neutral facepalm emoji?
Yes — the plain 🤦 code point (U+1F926) is gender-neutral in the Unicode spec, though some vendors render the default figure as male. Explicit 🤦♂️ and 🤦♀️ variants exist as ZWJ sequences if you want to specify man or woman.