Emoji get proposed by people, and this one came from Jay Peters, a writer at The Verge who has made a minor hobby of it — the yawning face and the waffle are also his doing. Unicode's document register logs the bubbles proposal in September 2019, and the character shipped with Unicode 14 in 2021.
What it means is unusually wide open. The official gloss stretches to soap suds, carbonation, and — a lovely phrase to find in the output of a standards body — "an effervescent personality". The keyword list bundled with it reads like a small found poem of unrelated ideas: soap, clean, oxygen, underwater, seltzer, burpy. One glyph on duty for a bath, a fizzy drink, a fish, and a mood.
And then there is the use the internet found within about a day. The Verge's own write-up of the new emoji ran under a headline promising it would go just great with the peach, on the reasoning that the peach stopped meaning fruit a long time ago — which makes the peach-plus-bubbles pairing a rather refined euphemism for a fart, and an upgrade on the older peach-and-dashing-away construction. Years of committee process, proposal documents and encoding review, and that is where it lands. Standards work is careful, deliberate and consensus-driven, right up until it meets the people who use it.
About Bubbles
Bubbles is the Unicode character 🫧 at codepoint U+1FAE7 in the Symbols and Pictographs Extended-A block of the Supplementary Multilingual Plane (SMP).
Technical Reference
| Unicode Codepoint | |
| Decimal | |
| UTF-8 (hex) | |
| UTF-16 (hex) | |
| HEX Entity | |
| HTML Entity | |
| CSS (\xxxx) | |
| JavaScript | |
| Python |
How to Use Bubbles
To use the Bubbles symbol (🫧) in HTML, insert the
entity 🫧 directly into your markup. The decimal entity 🫧 works in any HTML-serialised document.
In CSS pseudo-elements use content: '\1FAE7';.
In JavaScript and TypeScript the escape '\u{1FAE7}' evaluates to 🫧. In Python source, write '\U0001FAE7'.
The character encodes to F0 9F AB A7 as UTF-8 bytes and D83E DEE7 as UTF-16 code units. Its decimal codepoint is 129767.
This is a fully-qualified emoji and should render with colour on iOS, Android, Windows and macOS. Appearance may vary between platforms, but the underlying codepoint is identical everywhere.