A directional pointing pair, not another approval gesture, final in Emoji 18.0 since Unicode 18.0's release on September 16, 2026. As of September 25, 2026, no phone or computer shows them by default, but either codepoint copies with one click.
Leftwards Thumb Sign (๐ซน, U+1FAF9) and Rightwards Thumb Sign (๐ซบ, U+1FAFA) are a paired set of new emoji in Emoji 18.0, the emoji companion to Unicode 18.0, which became final on September 16, 2026. Despite the name, they aren't another approval gesture alongside Thumbs Up and Thumbs Down: they're horizontal, pointing signs, closer in job to the existing Backhand Index Pointing Left/Right emoji than to a vertical thumb. The pair answers a long-running community complaint: Unicode's gesture set has always skewed toward right-handed, vertical approval signs, with no clean way to point a thumb "at this one" versus "at that one" in a reply or comparison. There's real precedent for the category: the 2021 Pushing Hand proposal already established directional hand gestures as a legitimate emoji lane beyond simple thumbs-up approval. Unicode's final emoji data gives each sign all five skin-tone modifiers, so the pair comes in 10 skin-tone variants (five each). Final status puts the pair in the standard, not yet on screens. Google has published designs for both in its Noto Color Emoji font, but as of September 25, 2026, no operating system, keyboard, or system emoji font ships them, so expect a blank box or placeholder glyph until platforms add support. For when that happens, Emojipedia's estimate, based on last year's schedule, is WhatsApp, Samsung and Google in the first quarter of 2027, Apple around March or April 2027 and Microsoft in late summer or early fall 2027.
The two final characters themselves, copyable today as codepoints, even though no phone or computer shows them by default yet.
Need more than this one? Browse the full set in Hand Gesture Symbols โ
Already-encoded gestures Thumb Sign is most often compared to, or accused of duplicating.
Thumb Sign isn't the only new character in this release: these were approved alongside it on September 16, 2026, and most devices can't show them yet either.
Both thumb signs, U+1FAF9 and U+1FAFA, are listed with five skin-tone versions each in Unicode 18.0's emoji-test.txt data file, published with the Unicode Consortium's Unicode 18.0 announcement on September 16, 2026. Emojipedia reported Google's Noto Color Emoji designs for Emoji 18.0 and published the 2027 rollout estimates quoted above.
A Discord nickname stops at 32 characters, an Instagram bio at 150, a TikTok bio at 80, and X weights some characters as two. The UltraTextGen counter reads all of them at once, and counts a multi-codepoint Unicode emoji the way each platform actually bills it.
Open the character counter โPointing hands, approval gestures, and every already-encoded hand character.
The new Emoji 18.0 face that won the public vote.
Another new Emoji 18.0 emoji, reassigned from a deferred Apple Core proposal.
All 9 new emoji in the final release, ranked by public vote.