raised hand: medium-light skin tone
Unicode: 270B 1F3FC
Description
An emoji displaying a hand raised with the palm facing forward, often interpreted as a greeting, farewell, or a gesture to stop. This specific variant includes a light skin tone modifier.
Group:
People & Body > hand-fingers-open
Status:
fully-qualified
Emotion:
Can convey hello, goodbye, stop, or 'high five'. Its emotional context is highly dependent on accompanying text and situation.
Backstory
The raised hand emoji without a skin tone modifier was part of the original Unicode 6.0 emoji set (2010). The skin tone modifiers (Unicode 8.0, 2015) were introduced to allow users to personalize the representation of human-like emoji, reflecting diverse skin tones, based on the Fitzpatrick scale.
Usage Examples
- Greeting someone: 'Hey there! ✋🏻'
- Saying goodbye: 'See you later! ✋🏻'
- Requesting to stop: 'Hold on a second! ✋🏻'
- Acknowledging someone: 'Got it! ✋🏻'
- Offering a 'high five': 'Great job! ✋🏻'
Cultural Differences
Western culture:
Commonly used for waving hello or goodbye, or signaling 'stop' or 'talk to the hand'.
East Asian culture:
Similar uses for greetings and farewells. In some contexts, it might be less common for 'stop' than in Western cultures, where other gestures might prevail.