A directional pointing pair, not another approval gesture — drafted for Emoji 18.0, expected alongside Unicode 18.0 in September 2026. Draft only: not yet approved, and no font renders them yet. Click to copy either codepoint anyway.
Leftwards Thumb Sign (, U+1FAF9) and Rightwards Thumb Sign (, U+1FAFA) are a paired set of candidate emoji drafted for Emoji 18.0, the emoji companion to Unicode 18.0, expected to finalize in September 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. Between the two concepts, the pair carries 10 skin-tone variants once approved (five each). Because they're still drafts, no operating system, keyboard, or font currently renders either one; expect a blank box or placeholder glyph until Emoji 18.0 is approved and platforms ship support, likely sometime in 2027.
The two draft characters themselves — copyable today as codepoints, even though no font can render them yet.
Already-encoded gestures Thumb Sign is most often compared to, or accused of duplicating.
Thumb Sign isn't the only unapproved character in this release — these are drafted alongside it, equally unrendered until September 2026's decision.
Use UltraTextGen to convert plain text into bold, italic, cursive, and 100+ other Unicode font styles — free and instant.
Open UltraTextGen →Pointing hands, approval gestures, and every already-encoded hand character.
The Emoji 18.0 draft candidate that won the public vote.
Another Emoji 18.0 draft candidate — reassigned from a deferred Apple Core proposal.
The full draft slate of 9 candidates, ranked by public vote.