What ♨️ means
It marks hot springs and bathhouses. The curves show steam rising above a pool.
By 2026, its uses also include cooking steam and grill heat: beside dinner, the steam belongs to the food.
More like a place sign than an emotional reaction.
With food, read steam first—not a spa invite.
What it means when someone sends it to you
3 readingsOn a travel or spa post
A hot spring or bathhouse destination.
Next to noodles, curry or barbecue
Hot food, cooking steam or grill heat.
Alone, without a topic
Heat or steam, but the intended place or object is unclear. Ask what they mean.
Worth knowing
- The characters behind ♨️ existed in Unicode 8 years before anyone was allowed to draw them in colour: Unicode 3.2 in 2002, emoji presentation in 2010.
- ♨️ is not one character. It is 2 of them glued together, which is why deleting it sometimes takes two presses of backspace and why it breaks character counters.
Questions people ask
1Why does ♨️ look like the Java logo?
Similar steam shapes. The curves above a rounded pool can resemble a steaming cup, like the logo for the Java programming language.
How to type ♨️
Windows
Win+.Open the emoji picker and search “hot springs”.
macOS
Control+Command+Spaceopens the character viewer.
iOS / Android
Emoji keyboard → search “hot springs”.
Chat apps
:hotsprings:the common shortcode; support varies by platform.HTML
♨️Codes and encoding2 code points
HTML decimal
♨️
HTML hex
♨️
CSS content
content: "\2668\FE0F";
Each escape is closed by the next backslash; a trailing space is needed before a literal hex digit.
URL encoded
%E2%99%A8%EF%B8%8F
1
On screen
2
Code points
2
JS .length
6
UTF-8 bytes
A visible symbol can contain several code points. JS .length counts UTF-16 units; UTF-8 counts bytes.