person kneeling: medium-light skin tone
Unicode: 1F9CE 1F3FC
Description
A person with a red face and two hands covering their mouth, with a light skin tone. The hands are placed over the mouth, suggesting a gesture of disbelief, embarrassment, or surprise, sometimes accompanied by a blush.
Group:
People & Body > person-activity
Status:
fully-qualified
Emotion:
Typically expresses embarrassment, shame, shock, shyness, disbelief, surprise, or a 'facepalm' moment. The red face often indicates blushing.
Backstory
This emoji (originally 'Face with Hand Over Mouth') was approved as part of Unicode 10.0 in 2017 and added to Emoji 5.0. The skin tone modifier (1F3FC) was added later to allow for various skin tone representations, reflecting a standard practice for human-representing emojis.
Usage Examples
- Expressing embarrassment: 'I just complimented someone on their pregnancy, and they weren't pregnant. 🤦♀️🤦🏽♀️'
- Showing shock/disbelief: 'You did WHAT? 🤦🤯'
- Reacting to a cringe moment: 'That was so awkward to watch. 🤦'
- Representing shyness or blushing: 'He just complimented my new haircut 😳🤦🏻'
Cultural Differences
Western culture:
Commonly used to convey 'OMG, I can't believe it,' 'I'm so embarrassed,' or 'I'm blushing.'
East Asian culture:
Similar usage to Western culture, often used to express shyness, extreme embarrassment, or a 'cringe' feeling.