A yellow face with a faint smile whose lower half is sliding away — the standard way to type "I want to disappear" without saying it. Click any symbol to copy it instantly.
Melting Face (🫠, U+1FAE0) is a yellow circular face keeping a faint smile while its lower half dissolves into a puddle. It was approved as part of Unicode 14.0 and Emoji 14.0, released on 14 September 2021, from proposal L2/20-072, and platforms shipped it through 2022 — so it renders on essentially every current phone and desktop. The melting is doing emotional work rather than literal work: the face is still smiling, which is exactly why it reads as composure failing rather than sadness. That makes it the standard glyph for embarrassment, awkwardness, dread, being overwhelmed, and the "I'm fine" register where someone looks intact and isn't. Unicode's own CLDR keyword list for the character is worth reading as a meaning guide in itself — disappear, dissolve, embarrassed, face, haha, heat, hot, liquid, lol, melt, melting, sarcasm, sarcastic — because it puts the two readings people argue about, humour and sarcasm, in the official record alongside the literal heat sense. It is also routinely confused with Distorted Face, a much newer character that moves in the opposite direction; the difference is covered below.
The character itself, encoded at U+1FAE0 and supported across current platforms.
Neighbouring expressions covering embarrassment, strain and overwhelm. Distorted Face is the one most often mistaken for it, and it moves the opposite way — outward, not down.
When the melting is actually about temperature rather than feelings, these are what 🫠 gets paired with.
It means composure failing rather than plain sadness — the face keeps a faint smile while dissolving, so it carries embarrassment, awkwardness, dread, or being quietly overwhelmed. It is the usual way to type "I want to disappear" or "I'm fine" when you are not. It also has a straightforward literal use for heat.
It can be, and that reading is official rather than folk usage: Unicode's CLDR keyword list for U+1FAE0 includes both "sarcasm" and "sarcastic", alongside "haha" and "lol". So a melting face after a statement can flag irony the same way a dry tone would in speech. Context decides — the same character sincerely marks genuine embarrassment.
They move in opposite directions. 🫠 Melting Face (U+1FAE0) collapses downward — dissolving, embarrassed, resigned. Distorted Face (U+1FAEA) inflates and stretches outward — startled, overwhelmed, or swollen with ego. Both cover overwhelm; only one of them is expanding.
It was approved in Unicode 14.0 and Emoji 14.0, released on 14 September 2021, from proposal L2/20-072. Platform support rolled out over the following year, which is why it works on current devices but may show as an empty box on hardware or software left un-updated since before 2022.
On phones, search your emoji keyboard for "melt", "melting", "dissolve" or "embarrassed" — all four are official CLDR search keywords for this character, so the picker will find it. On desktop, copying the character from this page is faster than any alt-code route, because U+1FAE0 sits outside the range Windows alt codes can reach.
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The full embarrassment set — flushed, sweating, upside-down and melting.
Exhaustion and running-on-empty faces, where melting often ends up.
The character most often mistaken for this one — and it stretches outward instead.
An Emoji 18.0 draft candidate covering similar strain, not yet rendered anywhere.