What 🧄 means
🧄 is the garlic emoji, filed under Food & Drink in the food-vegetable subgroup of the Unicode emoji index.
It was added in Emoji 12.0 (2019) and the underlying characters entered Unicode in version 12.0 (2019).
How it is encoded
🧄 is a single code point, U+1F9C4.
It is RGI (recommended for general interchange), so every major platform ships artwork for it.
Casual, food-first, a little stinky and a little spooky.
After a breath complaint, 🧄 may be teasing you rather than suggesting dinner.
What it means when someone sends it to you
3 readingsBeside a recipe or shopping message
Garlic for cooking or something to buy.
After a complaint about breath or smell
A teasing reference to strong garlic odor.
Beside a vampire
Playing on the idea that garlic keeps vampires away.
Don't confuse it with
1Combination ideas
2Garlic bread.
Keep vampires away: joking protection.
Worth knowing
- 🧄 is a single code point, so it survives copying through almost anything — old databases, SMS gateways, printer drivers.
Questions people ask
1Why does the garlic look like a spade?
The shapes can look similar. In a 2022 Reddit discussion, a user described the iOS garlic artwork that way; this was an impression of that design, not another meaning.
How to type 🧄
Windows
Win+.Open the emoji picker and search “garlic”.
macOS
Control+Command+Spaceopens the character viewer.
iOS / Android
Emoji keyboard → search “garlic”.
Chat apps
:garlic:the common shortcode; support varies by platform.HTML
🧄Codes and encoding1 code points
HTML decimal
🧄
HTML hex
🧄
CSS content
content: "\1F9C4";
Each escape is closed by the next backslash; a trailing space is needed before a literal hex digit.
URL encoded
%F0%9F%A7%84
1
On screen
1
Code points
2
JS .length
4
UTF-8 bytes
A visible symbol can contain several code points. JS .length counts UTF-16 units; UTF-8 counts bytes.