🤔 shows a hand resting on the chin and one eyebrow cocked upward, the classic pose of someone chewing something over. It joined Unicode in 2015, and English speakers call it the “thinking face” or the “hmm” face. It began as a plain “let me think,” but online it picked up a second life as a skeptical raised eyebrow, so the same face can mean genuine reflection or a sarcastic “is that so?”
How it’s used
- Deciding: “What should I have for lunch 🤔”
- Puzzled: “Why isn’t this working 🤔”
- Doubtful: “Is that actually true 🤔”
- Brainstorming: “What if we tried it this way 🤔”
- Trailing off: “Hmm, let me think about it 🤔”
🧐 (face with monocle) examines something closely; 🤨 (face with raised eyebrow) is outright suspicion. 🤔 sits between them in a middle zone of “I’m weighing this, and I’m not sure I buy it.” It is not 🤫 (shushing face), where the finger is on the lips rather than the chin.
Korea, Japan and the English-speaking world
In English, 🤔 exploded in the mid-2010s on Twitter, where it was stuck onto outlandish claims as a joke. “Hmm 🤔 interesting” became shorthand for dry skepticism. You also see it in sincere brainstorming, so the sentence around it is what tells you whether it’s genuine pondering or a mocking jab.
In Korea, people pair it with “음…” and “흠…” to buy time in a chat. In a meeting, “검토해 보겠습니다🤔” can come across as a polite way of putting something off or declining, so it helps to make your meaning explicit in text, especially in work messages.
In Japan, it is called 考える顔 (“thinking face”) and goes with hesitation and trouble: “うーん🤔,” “どうしよう🤔.” It fits the Japanese habit of soft, noncommittal replies, and it typically carries less of the sarcasm that English speakers hear.
Where it gets misread
- A bare 🤔 under someone’s suggestion reads as doubt or disapproval. If you are just thinking about it, say “let me think about that.”
- Used with an English-speaking friend, it may come across as sarcastic even when you were sincere.
- Sent to someone sharing sad or frightening news, it looks detached.
- It is not 🙄: 🤔 hasn’t decided yet, while 🙄 already has, and it has been disappointed.
Design differences by platform
All four vendors show a hand at the chin and a raised brow. The differences lie in the hand’s shape (closer to a fist or an extended finger), the height of the brow and how serious the expression feels. Apple raises the brow clearly, making the puzzlement obvious; Google’s Noto draws it more simply and softly. Microsoft’s Fluent emphasizes the hand with a dimensional look, and Samsung is broadly similar, though the brow angle can tip a thoughtful face a little toward doubt.
