Herb

A green sprig for herbs, gardens and natural things. Gardeners use it for basil and mint, cooks for fresh ingredients, wellness and skincare accounts for “clean” and “natural”. It started on the emoji set of KDDI, a Japanese mobile carrier; Unicode drafts and proposals from 2007 and 2009 mapped those phone emoji into a shared standard, and 🌿 joined Unicode 6.0 in 2010 under the plain name “Herb”.

The edgier reading is cannabis. Among Rastafarians, members of a religious movement from Jamaica whose practice includes cannabis, “herb” is a word for the plant, described in 2017 as stressing its natural origin. The word happens to match the emoji's name; that does not make 🌿 a Rastafari symbol.

What does it mean when someone sends you 🌿?

A plant, unless the message adds a cannabis cue. A walk photo, a new houseplant or a recipe keeps it literal: fresh, calm, green goodwill. If you can't tell, answer the words around it rather than testing the sender's slang.

Neighbours flip it. In Virginia teen interviews discussed in 2023, young people described green leaf emojis alongside smoke or gas imagery in cannabis messages. So 420 or a smoke puff nearby points to weed; 🔥 alone is a weaker hint, since it usually means hype or “lit”. A seedling-to-tree sequence turns it into a growth story.