What 🧫 means
🧫 is the petri dish emoji, filed under Objects in the science subgroup of the Unicode emoji index.
It was added in Emoji 11.0 (2018) and the underlying characters entered Unicode in version 11.0 (2018).
How it is encoded
🧫 is a single code point, U+1F9EB.
It is RGI (recommended for general interchange), so every major platform ships artwork for it.
Scientific, with room for a dry joke about whatever you're growing.
Around illness, 🧫 can suggest germs or contamination rather than a harmless experiment.
Combination ideas
2Try it for: lab work, examining a sample
Try it for: an experiment brewing
Worth knowing
- In agar art, living microbes form pictures on agar, a jelly-like growth medium in petri dishes. The American Society for Microbiology featured it in its 2025 contest.
Questions people ask
1Why does it look different on Samsung?
Different artwork. Samsung's 2026 depiction includes a lid; an earlier Google design included a dropper. Those details don't change the emoji's meaning.
How to type 🧫
Windows
Win+.Open the emoji picker and search “petri dish”.
macOS
Control+Command+Spaceopens the character viewer.
iOS / Android
Emoji keyboard → search “petri dish”.
Chat apps
:petri_dish:the common shortcode; support varies by platform.HTML
🧫Codes and encoding1 code points
HTML decimal
🧫
HTML hex
🧫
CSS content
content: "\1F9EB";
Each escape is closed by the next backslash; a trailing space is needed before a literal hex digit.
URL encoded
%F0%9F%A7%AB
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.