Free Emoji Unicode Converter

How It Works

1. Enter an emoji or code point: paste an emoji character or type its Unicode code point (e.g. U+1F600).
2. View all representations: the tool shows the decimal code, hex value, HTML entity, CSS escape, UTF-8 bytes, and JavaScript escape sequence.
3. Copy any format: click any result to copy it instantly for use in HTML, CSS, or JavaScript code.

Why Use Emoji Unicode Converter?

Emojis are encoded as Unicode code points, but different systems use different formats. HTML content needs 😀 or 😀 entities. CSS pseudo-elements need the escaped form \1F600. JavaScript strings need \u{1F600}. Looking these up manually is slow, this tool generates every format instantly from a single emoji input. Developers, designers, and content creators use it to safely embed emojis in codebases where copy-paste of raw characters can introduce encoding issues.

Supported Output Formats

• Unicode point, U+1F600 notation for reference
• HTML decimal entity) 😀 for HTML pages
• HTML hex entity, 😀 alternative HTML form
• CSS escape) \1F600 for use in CSS content property
• JS escape, \u{1F600} for JavaScript string literals
• UTF-8 bytes) raw byte sequence for low-level encoding work

A short history of emoji, and the parts everyone gets wrong

The most-repeated origin story credits Shigetaka Kurita at NTT DoCoMo with creating "the first emoji" in 1998–1999. That story is true but incomplete. Two pre-Kurita developments deserve a mention:

• Sharp PA-8500 (October 1988). The earliest known set of pictographs that meet the modern definition of "emoji" appeared on a Japanese electronic organiser. It carried 102 pictographs at 16×16 pixels, a decade before Kurita's set. Emojipedia covered the rediscovery in 2024 after researchers found surviving units of the device.
• J-Phone DP-211SW (1997). Kurita himself acknowledged in a January 2019 social-media post that the first mobile phone with an emoji set was not DoCoMo's. He pointed to J-Phone's DP-211SW, which carried about 90 monochrome pictographs around 1997. SoftBank later absorbed J-Phone, which is why Apple's first emoji rollout in Japan (see below) shipped specifically for SoftBank SIM holders.
• Shigetaka Kurita's NTT DoCoMo i-mode set (1998–1999). Kurita led the design of a 176-emoji set drawn on a 12×12 pixel grid: about 18 bytes per glyph, three kilobytes for the full set, a critical constraint for the bandwidth-limited i-mode platform NTT DoCoMo launched in February 1999. He drew on Japanese manga symbols (manpu), weather pictograms, kanji and street signs. In 2016 the Museum of Modern Art (MoMA) in New York acquired Kurita's original 176-emoji set for its permanent design collection.

How emoji crossed over to the rest of the world

For a decade after Kurita's set, emoji were a Japanese carrier phenomenon, with three competing and incompatible vendor sets (DoCoMo, KDDI, SoftBank). The crossover happened in three stages:

• 21 November 2008, iPhone OS 2.2. Apple released the first version of Apple Color Emoji (471 individual glyphs at launch). The keyboard was officially restricted to Japanese iPhone users on SoftBank SIM cards. Apple Color Emoji is widely cited as the first colour font shipped in any major operating system.
• 12 October 2011, iOS 5. Apple released iOS 5 worldwide, and for the first time the emoji keyboard could be enabled by anyone, anywhere, from a Settings menu. Most historians cite this as the start of emoji's global takeoff.
• 31 October 2013, Android 4.4 KitKat. Google's first version with full colour-emoji support and a built-in emoji keyboard. The KitKat set contained roughly 850 emoji and introduced Google's distinctive blob-style design (since replaced in Android 8 Oreo with the more conventional round design we see today).

The Unicode Consortium's standardisation work ran in parallel. October 2010, Unicode 6.0 was the first version of the standard to add emoji as a recognised set, contributing roughly 722 emoji from the union of Japanese carrier sets. August 2014, Unicode Technical Report #51 was published (later promoted to UTS #51 in May 2017), the formal specification of how emoji are encoded, sequenced and presented.

Why most emoji code points live above U+FFFF

Unicode organises every character into 17 "planes" of 65,536 code points each. Plane 0 is the Basic Multilingual Plane (BMP), U+0000 through U+FFFF. Most everyday written language lives here. Planes 1–16 are supplementary planes (informally "astral planes"), U+10000 through U+10FFFF. The vast majority of emoji live in Plane 1, the Supplementary Multilingual Plane, specifically in blocks like Emoticons (U+1F600–U+1F64F), Miscellaneous Symbols and Pictographs (U+1F300–U+1F5FF), Transport and Map Symbols (U+1F680–U+1F6FF), and Supplemental Symbols and Pictographs (U+1F900–U+1F9FF). The newer Symbols and Pictographs Extended-A block sits at U+1FA70–U+1FAFF.

This matters for developers because of UTF-16. UTF-16 encodes BMP code points as a single 16-bit unit, but supplementary code points must be encoded as a surrogate pair: two 16-bit units, one from the high-surrogate range U+D800–U+DBFF and one from the low-surrogate range U+DC00–U+DFFF. JavaScript's string type is internally UTF-16, which is why "😀".length returns 2 instead of 1: the engine is counting code units, not code points. Modern JS code uses Array.from("😀").length or the Intl.Segmenter API to count grapheme clusters correctly.

UTF-8 handles the same emoji as a 4-byte sequence. The character 😀 (U+1F600) is F0 9F 98 80 in UTF-8. This is why MySQL's older utf8 charset (which is really utf8mb3, capped at 3-byte sequences) cannot store emoji, you need utf8mb4. MySQL 8.0 made utf8mb4 the default, but legacy databases still fail to store emoji and silently truncate or error depending on SQL mode. This is a frequent real-world bug.

Variation selectors, why the same heart can look black or red

A handful of Unicode characters have a "dual personality": they can appear as a plain monochrome text symbol or as a colourful emoji, depending on context. Two presentation selectors were added to Unicode 3.2 (March 2002): U+FE0F (Variation Selector-16, VS16) requests emoji presentation, and U+FE0E (VS15) requests text presentation. Example: ❤ (U+2764, "Heavy Black Heart") is a text-default symbol; ❤️ (U+2764 U+FE0F) is the emoji-presentation red heart that most apps render in colour. The same code point with and without VS16 looks completely different.

A famous related example is the sun. U+2600 "Black Sun With Rays" defaults to text-style monochrome; adding VS16 (U+2600 U+FE0F) gives the colourful ☀️. By contrast, U+1F31E "Sun With Face" is a separate code point added in Unicode 6.0 (October 2010), default emoji presentation, and renders as the smiling 🌞 without needing any selector. Two different code points, two different histories, both informally called "the sun emoji."

Skin-tone modifiers and the Fitzpatrick scale

In Unicode 8.0 (released 17 June 2015) the standard added five modifier characters that adjust the skin tone of any human-presenting emoji. The modifiers are based on the Fitzpatrick scale, a dermatological classification developed in 1975 by American dermatologist Thomas B. Fitzpatrick at Harvard. The medical scale has six types (I to VI). For emoji purposes, types I and II are merged into a single modifier, leaving five emoji modifiers:

• U+1F3FB Light (Fitzpatrick I–II)
• U+1F3FC Medium-Light (Fitzpatrick III)
• U+1F3FD Medium (Fitzpatrick IV)
• U+1F3FE Medium-Dark (Fitzpatrick V)
• U+1F3FF Dark (Fitzpatrick VI)

Usage is positional: the modifier comes immediately after a supported human emoji. For example, 👋 (U+1F44B, waving hand) + U+1F3FD produces 👋🏽, the medium-tone wave. If a recipient's font doesn't support a particular base+modifier combination, the modifier renders as a separate brown square, a common failure mode on older systems.

Zero-Width Joiner sequences) how compound emoji are built

The Zero-Width Joiner, code point U+200D, is the "glue" character that lets multiple emoji combine into one composite glyph when the renderer recognises the sequence. ZWJ is invisible and has no width, it exists purely to signal to the rendering engine that the surrounding characters should fuse. Three patterns dominate:

• Family sequences. A family emoji such as 👨‍👩‍👧‍👦 ("family: man, woman, girl, boy") is encoded as U+1F468 U+200D U+1F469 U+200D U+1F467 U+200D U+1F466: four people emoji separated by ZWJ. If the receiving device doesn't have the specific composite glyph, the fallback is to display every component side by side. This is one of the most common visible failures of cross-platform emoji rendering.
• Profession and role sequences. 👩‍💻 ("woman technologist") is U+1F469 U+200D U+1F4BB: woman + ZWJ + laptop. Most profession emoji in current Unicode are built this way, which keeps the standard from minting a separate code point for every job-and-skin-tone combination.
• Identity and pride sequences. The rainbow flag 🏳️‍🌈 is U+1F3F3 U+FE0F U+200D U+1F308: white flag with VS16 + ZWJ + rainbow.

Used heavily in Unicode 15.1 (released 12 September 2023): 118 new emoji were added in 15.1, of which 108 were directional variants of existing emoji (people facing right rather than the default left). Crucially, 15.1 added zero new base code points: every new emoji was a sequence built from existing components.

Keycaps, regional indicators, and the flag mechanism

Keycap sequences. A keycap emoji such as 1️⃣ is built from three code points: a digit (U+0031 = "1"), VS16 (U+FE0F), and the Combining Enclosing Keycap character U+20E3. The combining keycap was approved as part of Unicode 3.0 in 1999. The full set of keycap emoji covers 0–9 plus # and *. The three-character sequence trips up naive .length checks all the time.

Regional indicator pairs (flags). Unicode does not encode national flags as single characters. Instead, it defines 26 Regional Indicator Symbols, code points U+1F1E6 through U+1F1FF, each corresponding to a Latin letter A through Z. A flag is a pair of regional indicators that spells out an ISO 3166-1 alpha-2 country code. The French flag 🇫🇷 is U+1F1EB U+1F1F7: the regional-indicator letters F and R. Of the 26 × 26 = 676 possible pairs, only about 270 correspond to valid ISO country codes; the rest render as two letter symbols on most platforms.

Recent emoji versions, briefly

• Unicode 15.0, released 13 September 2022. Added 31 new emoji including pink heart 🩷, light-blue heart 🩵, grey heart 🩶, pushing-hand 🫷🫸, shaking face 🫨, jellyfish 🪼, moose 🫎, donkey 🫏, ginger root 🫚.
• Unicode 15.1, released 12 September 2023. Added 118 new emoji, all ZWJ sequences rather than new base code points. 108 were directional variants; the rest included the phoenix 🐦‍🔥, lime 🍋‍🟩, edible brown mushroom 🍄‍🟫 and broken chain ⛓️‍💥.
• Unicode 16.0, released 10 September 2024. Added 8 new emoji: Face with Bags Under Eyes 🫩 (U+1FAE9), Fingerprint 🫆 (U+1FAC6), Splatter 🫟 (U+1FADF), Root Vegetable 🫜 (U+1FADC), Leafless Tree 🪾 (U+1FABE), Harp 🪉 (U+1FA89), Shovel 🪏 (U+1FA8F), and Flag of Sark 🇨🇶. Note: the new face is officially "Face with Bags Under Eyes," not "yawning face" (the yawning-face emoji 🥱 U+1F971 was added in Unicode 12.0 in 2019 and is unrelated).
• Unicode 17.0) released 9 September 2025. Added 7 new code-point emoji: Distorted Face, Fight Cloud, Hairy Creature (informally Bigfoot), Orca, Landslide, Trombone, and Treasure Chest. Plus 156 derivative skin-tone and gender variations, bringing the total of new emoji in 17.0 to 163. Most major vendors plan rollout across the first half of 2026; Microsoft typically lags by another quarter or two.

Vendor designs, same code point, different artwork

Unicode standardises the meaning and the code point, never the artwork. Every platform ships its own emoji font, and the visual differences are real enough to have caused documented miscommunication in academic studies (Hecht et al., CSCW 2018, on cross-platform emoji misinterpretation). The major fonts:

• Apple Color Emoji ships on iOS, iPadOS, macOS, tvOS. First shipped November 2008 with 471 glyphs; expanded to 3,633+ by September 2021. Proprietary; cannot be redistributed legally outside Apple platforms.
• Noto Color Emoji (Google) ships on Android (since 4.4 KitKat, October 2013), ChromeOS, Gmail. Open source under the SIL Open Font License.
• Segoe UI Emoji (Microsoft) ships on Windows 8.1 onward. The Fluent Emoji refresh in 2021 introduced 3D-style designs in Microsoft 365.
• One UI Emoji (Samsung) on Galaxy phones, distinct from Google's Noto despite Android using Noto by default.
• Twemoji open-sourced by Twitter on 6 November 2014 with 874 SVG designs (MIT code, CC-BY 4.0 graphics). The original Twitter repo hasn't been actively maintained since the X rebrand; community forks (notably jdecked/twemoji) carry the standard forward.

When a device's font has no glyph for a particular code point or sequence, browsers and operating systems display a blank rectangle, commonly called tofu. Tofu is the strongest possible signal that the recipient's device is older than the sender's. New emoji typically take six to eighteen months to propagate from a Unicode release to all major platforms.

Accessibility, what content authors should know

Modern screen readers (NVDA, JAWS, VoiceOver, TalkBack) read out the CLDR short name of each emoji from the Unicode Common Locale Data Repository, for example "grinning face" for 😀, "family: man, woman, girl, boy" for 👨‍👩‍👧‍👦. The Unicode CLDR maintains official short names and keywords in 90+ languages, which is what every major screen reader on Apple and Microsoft platforms uses. WCAG technique H86 recommends wrapping meaningful emoji in <span role="img" aria-label="thumbs up">👍</span>; decorative emoji should be hidden with aria-hidden="true". Three pitfalls: repeated emoji become verbose (😂😂😂😂😂 reads as "Face with tears of joy" five times); text-style emoticons (:)) read as "colon close-paren" with no Unicode short name; skin-tone modifiers are read aloud (👋🏽 reads as "waving hand: medium skin tone", informative but slower).

Emojipedia and the cultural infrastructure

Emojipedia was founded in 2013 by Jeremy Burge, an Australian designer who registered the domain on a whim after a birthday dinner. It is now the de facto reference site for emoji meanings, vendor designs, and release coverage, serving roughly 590 million page views in 2021. Burge sat on the Unicode Emoji Subcommittee, served as Emojipedia's "Chief Emoji Officer" until 2022, and created World Emoji Day (17 July): chosen because Apple's calendar emoji 📅 displays the date 17 July, itself a nod to the original launch date of Apple's iCal at Macworld Expo in 2002. Emojipedia was acquired by Zedge, Inc. (NYSE: ZDGE) in August 2021 and continues to operate under the same brand. The Unicode Emoji Subcommittee, which evaluates new emoji proposals, is currently chaired by Jennifer Daniel, a former Google design lead, the first woman to chair the subcommittee.

Quick-reference numbers

• 3,953: total emoji as of Unicode 17.0 (September 2025)
• 176: Kurita's original i-mode set (1999)
• 102: pictograph count on the Sharp PA-8500 (1988)
• 12×12: pixel grid of Kurita's i-mode emoji
• 5: skin-tone modifier count (Fitzpatrick I and II merged)
• U+200D: Zero-Width Joiner
• U+FE0F / U+FE0E: emoji / text presentation selectors
• U+20E3: Combining Enclosing Keycap
• U+1F1E6 to U+1F1FF: regional indicator letters A–Z used to build flag pairs
• F0 9F 98 80: UTF-8 bytes for U+1F600 (😀)
• 17 July: World Emoji Day
• 21 November 2008: iPhone OS 2.2, first colour emoji font
• 12 October 2011: iOS 5, emoji keyboard available globally
• October 2010: Unicode 6.0, first standard version with emoji
• 17 June 2015: Unicode 8.0, skin-tone modifiers added