Selfie

It shows the selfie pose: arm out, phone screen facing you. The picture is only a forearm and a hand gripping a phone, no face, which is why it looks a little odd in a row of smiling emoji. Where you see a face depends on what the sender puts next to it.

Most of the time it is a caption. Under a holiday photo, a new haircut, a gym mirror shot or a group picture taken at arm's length, 🤳 means “taken by me, of me”, often with a wink at the mild vanity of it. In words, it stands for the act itself: “outfit check 🤳”, “getting ready 🤳✨”, “tourist mode 🤳”. Influencers, K-pop fans posting idol selfies and anyone sharing a photo dump use it as a cheerful label for the selfie habit rather than for one specific image.

Does 🤳 mean “send me a selfie”?

Sometimes, and the words around it settle it. A bare 🤳 after “what are you wearing?” or “show me the new glasses” is a request. After “at the concert!” or “made it to the top!” it means the sender is taking one. Sent completely alone, it is a nudge to share a picture or an announcement that one is coming. If you are not sure, reply with a photo or just ask; nobody minds either answer.

How did the selfie become an emoji?

The habit and the word came well before the emoji. The earliest documented use of “selfie” is a post on an Australian online forum from 2002, where a man apologised for a blurry photo of his cut lip. Phones with front cameras turned the word from Australian slang into everyday English, and Oxford Dictionaries named it Word of the Year in 2013.

The emoji came out of that boom. In 2014 the iDiversicons emoji set proposed a smiley holding up a phone. The 2015 proposal that Unicode accepted stripped it down to an arm and a phone on purpose, so that a face emoji placed before it would show who is taking the picture. Apps never joined the two into one image, which is why 🤳 is a lone arm.