face mask
Faces
What it means when sent
I am ill, or I am being considerate; in East Asia a mask is everyday courtesy, while elsewhere it still signals sickness or worry.
Official name vs. real use
The name Unicode gave it and the way people use it are not the same. If you searched your way here, the second one is usually what you were after.
- Official name
- face with medical mask
- What people call it
- face mask
- Code point
- U+1F637
- Code points
- 1
A single code point. One backspace deletes it.
The most misread group. 😭 is sent for joy more often than for sorrow, and 💀 for laughter more often than for death.
Using emojis
- Tap the character to copy it and paste it anywhere — it is text, not an image, so its size follows the font around it.
- Sender and receiver on different devices see different drawings. Apple, Google and Samsung each draw their own, and for some emojis that changes the meaning (🙃, 😅).
- At work, an emoji standing in for a sentence invites misreading. In some countries a bare 👍 reads as a brush-off.
- Putting emojis in a page title does not help search ranking — they are usually stripped from the result.
- Skin-tone variants are not listed here. Only the base form is, because the meaning does not change with them.
Common questions
Q. What does 😷 mean?
I am ill, or I am being considerate; in East Asia a mask is everyday courtesy, while elsewhere it still signals sickness or worry.
Q. What is its official name?
Unicode calls it face with medical mask, code point U+1F637. It sits under Faces.
Q. Does it survive copy and paste?
On most devices, yes — though every vendor draws it slightly differently.