woman facepalming: medium-dark skin tone
Unicode: 1F926 1F3FE 200D 2640 FE0F
Description
A person shrugging, combining the base emoji 1F926 (Shrug) with a dark skin tone modifier (1F3FE) and a ZWJ sequence for the female sign (200D 2640 FE0F). The person has their shoulders raised and hands open, palms up, indicating indifference, lack of knowledge, or 'I don't know.'
Group:
People & Body > person-gesture
Status:
fully-qualified
Emotion:
Conveys uncertainty, indifference, confusion, resignation, or a lack of responsibility. It can also imply a playful 'what can you do?' attitude.
Backstory
The core 'Shrug' emoji (1F926) was introduced in Unicode 9.0 (2016). It represents the popular 'shrug' text emoticon '¯\_(ツ)_/¯' which became widely used on the internet. The addition of skin tone modifiers and gender variations (like this one for a woman with dark skin tone) followed to provide more inclusive representation.
Usage Examples
- When you literally don't know the answer: 'Where did I leave my keys? 🤷🏾♀️'
- Expressing indifference: 'Are we going out tonight? 🤷🏾♀️ Whatever, I'm tired.'
- Acknowledging a lack of control: 'Traffic is terrible today. 🤷🏾♀️'
- Responding to an unanswerable question: 'Why is the sky blue? 🤷🏾♀️'
Cultural Differences
Western culture:
Widely understood and used to express 'I don't know,' 'who cares?', or a general shrugging gesture in text. Very common in informal communication.
East Asian culture:
While the gesture is universal, its digital representation might be used in similar contexts, but perhaps less frequently than in Western digital communication, where it's a very established meme.