Cool Emoji

😎 Smiling Face with Sunglasses is the emoji for cool, full stop. It says relaxed, confident, nothing bothers me, and it is the one most keyboards return when you type "cool". Its text ancestor is B-), and the matching object is 🕶️ Sunglasses, which carries the same attitude without a face. 😏 Smirking Face is cool with a wink of mischief; 😈 Smiling Face with Horns is cool with bad intentions; 🫡 Saluting Face is the crisp "yes sir, on it"; and 😤 Face with Steam from Nose, drawn as anger, is in practice the gym-and-grind emoji for powering through. 🥶 Cold Face is literally ice cold, used for "that was cold" and for freezing weather, while 🥵 Hot Face is both heat and "you look hot".

🤙 Call Me Hand is the shaka, the Hawaiian surfers' hang-loose sign, and the usual "swag emoji hand" people search for: thumb and little finger out, everything chill. 🤘 Sign of the Horns is rock on, the heavy-metal salute Ronnie James Dio made famous. ✌️ is peace, 🤟 is "I love you" in American Sign Language and reads as a softer rock sign, 👊 is a fist bump, 💪 is strength and 🦾 is the bionic version of it. 🔥 Fire is the all-purpose "lit": a great photo, a great song, a great outfit. 💯 Hundred Points means perfect, agreed completely, and ⚡ High Voltage adds energy and speed. 💀 Skull stopped meaning death years ago; today it is "I'm dead", the Gen Z way to say something is so funny it killed you, and it doubles as a dark, deadpan reaction. 🗿 Moai is the stone face that says stoic, unimpressed, nothing to add.

Cool emoji for Instagram bios, usernames and Discord

Most searches for cool emoji are really searches for a bio or a name. The rule that works is one theme, three emoji: 😎🏍️💨 for the rider, 🎧🎶🖤 for the music head, 🎮👾🔥 for the gamer, 🏀🐐💯 for the athlete, 💅🖤👑 for the cool-girl bio. Pick an animal that matches the energy you want, 🐺 lone wolf, 🦁 king, 🦅 eagle, 🦈 shark, 🐉 dragon, 🐍 snake, 🦂 scorpion or 🐐 for the GOAT, the greatest of all time, and put it beside your name. Money and "ice" add the rich-and-shiny note: 💎 diamond, 🧊 ice, ⛓️ chains, 💰 money bag and 💸 money with wings.

Where emoji go depends on the app. Instagram usernames allow only letters, numbers, periods and underscores, so the cool emoji go in the name field and the bio, where 😎 🔥 👑 and 🖤 show in full colour. TikTok, Discord, Snapchat and most game launchers accept emoji in display names, and Discord also takes shortcodes: :sunglasses: 😎, :call_me: 🤙, :metal: 🤘, :fire: 🔥, :100: 💯, :skull: 💀, :zap: ⚡, :crown: 👑, :moyai: 🗿 and :cool: for the 🆒 button. Where emoji are not allowed at all, usually in game usernames, switch to the text symbols in the next section.

Cool symbols and text faces: ★ ♛ ⚡ ツ (⌐■_■)

Cool symbols are plain Unicode characters, so they survive in usernames, gamertags and bios where colour emoji are stripped, and they match the text colour around them. The most typed ones are the stars ★ ☆ ✪ ✯ ✰ ✦ ✧ ✮, the chess crowns ♛ ♚ ♕ ♔ (the standard "king" and "queen" of a nickname), the crosses ✞ ✠, the skull 🕱, the inverted pentagram ⛧, the heavy ballot X ✘, the flag ⚑, the spade ♤ and the infinity sign ∞. ϟ is really the Greek letter koppa, but it has been the lightning bolt of fan names since the Harry Potter years, and 𖤐, a letter of the Bamum script of Cameroon, became the little black star of 2020s edgy usernames because it looks like a pentagram.

The decorations around a name are letters too: ꧁ ꧂ are Javanese ornaments used as brackets (꧁★ Name ★꧂), 𓆩 𓆪 are Egyptian hieroglyphs of a shell used the same way, and ᯓ, a Batak letter from Sumatra, became the "shooting star" of ᯓ★. ツ ㋡ シ are Japanese katakana that look like a winking smile, and ☻ is the old black smiley. The sunglasses face has a text version as well: (⌐■_■), the "deal with it" face from the GIF where sunglasses drop onto a face, with (▀̿Ĺ̯▀̿ ̿) as the tough-guy variant. For more faces see Kaomoji Symbols; for fancier decorations, Fancy Symbols and Nickname Symbols.

Where cool came from: jazz, sunglasses and the COOL button

"Cool" as praise comes from 1940s jazz, where musicians such as Lester Young used it for a relaxed, controlled style, and "cool jazz" became a genre at the end of that decade; that is why 🎷 Saxophone and 🎧 Headphone still feel like they belong here. Sunglasses became the uniform of cool through the same scene and through film stars, so when Japanese phone carriers drew their first emoji sets, a smiling face in dark glasses was an obvious one. 😎 and the 🆒 COOL button, a blue "COOL" badge from those Japanese sets, both reached Unicode 6.0 in 2010 together with 🔥 💯 💀 🗿 👑 🐺 and 🎮.

⚡ is older: it entered Unicode 4.0 in 2003 as a high-voltage warning sign and only later became an emoji. ✌️ Victory Hand goes back to Unicode 1.1 in 1993, borrowed from the Wingdings font. The newer arrivals filled in the attitude: 🤘 and 🦁 🐐 🦂 in 2015, 🤙 🦅 🦈 🖤 in 2016, 🥶 🦸 🦹 🛹 in 2018, 🦾 and 🧊 in 2019, 🥷 in 2020, 🫡 in 2021 and 🐦‍🔥 Phoenix in 2023.

Cool emoji on Snapchat, iPhone and Android

On Snapchat, 😎 next to a friend's name is not a mood but a friend emoji: it means one of your best friends is also one of theirs, you both snap the same person a lot. The 🔥 beside a name there is a Snapstreak, consecutive days of snapping each other, with the number of days next to it. In normal chats and comments 😎 and 🔥 just mean cool and lit.

Every platform draws these in its own style, but the characters are identical, so a 😎 sent from an iPhone is a 😎 on Android, WhatsApp and Discord. The quickest way to find them is to search the emoji keyboard: typing "cool" on iPhone and on Gboard brings up 😎 and 🆒, "fire" gives 🔥, "100" gives 💯. On Windows press the Windows key + . (period), on a Mac Control + Command + Space. The youngest members need a recent system: 🐦‍🔥 Phoenix is really 🐦 and 🔥 joined by an invisible joiner, so a phone from before 2024 shows it as a bird next to a fire.