Sarcastic & Sassy Emoji

🙃 Upside-Down Face is the closest thing to an official sarcasm emoji. It is a normal smile flipped over, so whatever it follows is read the other way round: "great, another meeting 🙃" means the opposite of great. It also carries a quieter sense of "this is fine" while everything is on fire, and a resigned "oh well". 🙃 and 🙄 Face with Rolling Eyes arrived together in Unicode 8.0 in 2015, and between them they cover most sarcasm: 🙃 for irony you are smiling through, 🙄 for irony you cannot be bothered to hide.

🙂 Slightly Smiling Face was meant as a mild, friendly smile. In practice the tight little mouth reads as polite at best and passive-aggressive at worst: a 🙂 after "sure" or "no problem" is a smile with teeth behind it. Younger users send it on purpose for exactly that effect. If you want a warm smile, use 😊; if you want to sound like you are smiling while plotting, 🙂 is the one.

😏 Smirking Face is the smug half-smile with raised eyebrow and side glance: "I knew it", "nice try", or a suggestive hint. 😒 Unamused Face is the side-eye emoji proper, looking away in disappointment, and 🤨 Face with Raised Eyebrow (2017) is the sceptical "sure you did". 😐 😑 are the deadpan stare, 😬 the awkward grimace when somebody has said too much, and 🫠 Melting Face is sarcasm's newest recruit: smiling while dissolving into a puddle of embarrassment or dread.

Sassy emoji: 💅, 💁, 🤷 and the hair flip

💅 Nail Polish is the sassy emoji people search for most, often as "sassy emoji with nails". It shows a hand admiring freshly painted nails, and the gesture means unbothered: "and I did it anyway 💅", "not my problem 💅". With ✨ around a word it adds mock glamour: ✨sarcasm✨. It has been around since the first big emoji batch of 2010, but TikTok and Twitter turned it into the shorthand for having the upper hand.

💁 Person Tipping Hand is officially the information desk person, palm up as if to say "may I help you?". Everybody uses it as the hair-flip, sassy-girl emoji: "told you so 💁". 💇 Person Getting Haircut fills in as a literal hair flip when you want the salon energy. 🤷 Person Shrugging is "whatever, not my department", 🤦 Person Facepalming is "I cannot believe you just said that", and 🙎 the pouting person is a huff with crossed arms. All three gesturing people came in Unicode 9.0 in 2016, replacing the text shrug for many users.

Hands carry attitude too. 🤌 Pinched Fingers is the Italian "what do you want from me?" and, flipped around, a sarcastic chef's kiss. 👏 clapped between words is the slow clap: "well 👏 done 👏". 👌 and 👍 are a sarcastic "okay then" when sent alone with no words, 👎 is open disapproval, 🫵 points the blame at the reader ("this is about you"), 🤚 is "talk to the hand", and ✌️💨 is "peace, I'm out". 🖕 is where sass stops being funny; keep it for people who will laugh.

Spill the tea: ☕ 🐸 👀 🤡 and the meme reactions

A whole family of sarcastic emoji are not faces at all but props from memes. ☕ Hot Beverage and 🐸 Frog together are Kermit sipping tea, the 2014 meme captioned "but that's none of my business": you have noticed something, you are judging it, and you are saying nothing. 🍵 and 🫖 are "spill the tea", the request for gossip, and the reply "☕👀" means "go on, I'm listening". 🍿 Popcorn is for settling in to watch drama unfold in someone else's comments.

👀 Eyes alone is the shifty side glance ("I saw that"), and 👁️👄👁️ is the wide-eyed staring face of the 2020 meme, used for "it is what it is" or for watching something unfold in disbelief. 🌚 New Moon Face and 🌝 Full Moon Face are the shady moons: they peer sideways with a knowing smile, and people use them as a creepier, funnier side-eye. 📸 is "caught in 4K", proof you have been seen.

🤡 Clown Face means foolishness, usually your own: "I believed him again 🤡". 🗿 Moai, the stone head, is the deadpan "bruh" reaction, a face so blank it is sarcastic. 💀 is "I'm dead" when something is funny, but a single 💀 after a bad take also reads as "that killed me, and not in a good way". 🥶 is "sheesh, that was cold" after a savage comeback, 🐍 marks a snake, a fake friend, 🧢 is "cap", a lie, and 🚩 is a red flag you are pretending not to see. 🪑 Chair is the TikTok in-joke of 2021 where a chair stood in for laughing, so that outsiders would not get it.

Passive-aggressive emoji at work: 👍, 🙂 and "k"

The same emoji that are fun between friends can land badly in a work chat. A bare 👍 as a reply reads as "noted" to older colleagues and as dismissive to younger ones, which is why "passive aggressive emoji thumbs up" is a real search. 🙂 after a request looks like a smile through gritted teeth. "Ok 🆗" or "cool 🆒" with nothing else sound like "whatever". ⏳ after a question means "still waiting", and 🥱 or 💤 say the message bored you.

If you want to be clearly friendly in Teams, Slack or Outlook, add a word or pick a warmer face: 😊 or 👍 plus "thanks!" never reads as sarcasm. If you want to be sarcastic on purpose and stay safe, 🙃 is the gentlest choice, because it admits the irony. Every emoji on this page is plain Unicode, so it pastes into any of those apps; on Windows the picker opens with the Windows key and the full stop, on a Mac with Control, Command and Space.

Sarcastic text symbols: ⸮, ¯\_(ツ)_/¯ and ಠ_ಠ

Sarcasm had a punctuation mark before it had an emoji. ⸮ Reversed Question Mark is the percontation point that the English printer Henry Denham proposed in the 1580s to mark a rhetorical question, and later writers reused the same shape as an irony mark. Nobody adopted it widely, which is itself a little ironic, but it works in any modern font and makes a neat sarcasm symbol at the end of a sentence⸮ Alternating caps, "sUrE iT dOeS", do the same job after the 2017 mocking SpongeBob meme.

The text faces are built from letters of other scripts. The shrug ¯\_(ツ)_/¯ uses ¯ Macron for the hands and ツ, the Japanese katakana tsu, for the smug little face. The look of disapproval ಠ_ಠ is two Kannada letters ṭha from southern India, and 눈_눈 is a Korean side-eye made of the syllable 눈, which happens to mean "eye". ¬_¬ uses the logic not-sign for a sideways glance, ◔_◔ rolls its eyes with quarter-black circles, and ¬‿¬ smirks with the undertie ‿ as its mouth.

( ͡° ͜ʖ ͡°) is the Lenny face, first posted on a Finnish image board in 2012 and now the universal suggestive smirk; its parts are two combining marks ͡ and ͜, the degree sign ° for the eyes and ʖ, an IPA letter, for the nose. (⌐■_■) is "deal with it", sunglasses dropping onto a face: ⌐ for the arm and ■ Black Square for the lenses. All of these parts are in the grid above, so you can copy a whole face from the combos or build your own.