About Lipstick
Lipstick is the Unicode character 💄 at codepoint U+1F484 in the Miscellaneous Symbols and Pictographs block of the Supplementary Multilingual Plane (SMP).
Reference
A cosmetic object with no hand attached. U+1F484 sits in Miscellaneous Symbols and Pictographs, dates from Unicode 6.0, has general category So and carries Emoji_Presentation. The character immediately after it in the block is U+1F485, this site's nail polish page, and the pair makes a clean structural point: the nail polish shows a hand, so it is one of the standard's 134 Emoji_Modifier_Base characters and takes five skin-tone forms, while this one shows only the tube and takes none. Unicode's chart gives it no annotation and no cross-reference. CLDR's keywords are cosmetics, date, lipstick and makeup, and Unicode's test data files it with the clothing, a subgroup of forty-seven fully qualified entries.
Typical uses
- Cosmetics and getting-ready contexts, which the keywords name
- Beauty sections in documents and interfaces
- Not as a kiss mark — that is a separate character showing the print, not the tube
At a glance
- U+1F484, Miscellaneous Symbols and Pictographs; Unicode 6.0; general category So
- Emoji version E0.6; Emoji_Presentation, so no U+FE0F is needed
- No chart annotation and no cross-reference
- Not a skin-tone base, unlike the character immediately after it
- No HTML named entity. Write 💄 or 💄
Historical Notes
Origins
What the character has come to signal, and how the drawings vary between vendors, is a matter of usage. The chart records neither.
Unicode
Added in Unicode 6.0, published in 2010, as emoji version E0.6. Its subgroup, clothing, holds forty-seven fully qualified entries and forty-four single codepoints, which makes it one of the larger object groupings in the standard's test data.
The rule that decides which objects get skin
Skin-tone modifiers attach only to Emoji_Modifier_Base characters, and there are exactly 134 of them in the whole standard. The property tracks one thing: whether the glyph shows human skin. A hand holding a brush qualifies; a tube of colour does not, however closely the two are related in meaning. That is why these two adjacent characters behave differently — not because the standard ranks one above the other, but because a skin-tone modifier has nothing to colour on a tube. The same rule explains why the writing hand and the selfie are modifier bases while the objects filed beside them are not.
Developer Notes
| Unicode Codepoint | |
| Decimal | |
| UTF-8 (hex) | |
| UTF-16 (hex) | |
| HEX Entity | |
| HTML Entity | |
| CSS (\xxxx) | |
| JavaScript | |
| Python |
How to Use Lipstick
To use the Lipstick 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: '\1F484';.
In JavaScript and TypeScript the escape '\u{1F484}' evaluates to 💄. In Python source, write '\U0001F484'.
The character encodes to F0 9F 92 84 as UTF-8 bytes and D83D DC84 as UTF-16 code units. Its decimal codepoint is 128132.
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.
Things to know
- Not Emoji_Modifier_Base. Appending a skin-tone modifier produces two characters side by side, not one tinted glyph.
- Outside the Basic Multilingual Plane, so a surrogate pair D83D DC84 in UTF-16 and a naive character count of two.
- Not a variation-sequence base, so U+FE0E does not request a text form.
- East Asian Width Wide; line break class ID.
- The kiss mark is a different character. If your interface needs the print rather than the tube, this is the wrong one.
- No named HTML entity. Write 💄 or 💄.
In the Wild
An encyclopaedia article on lipstick contains none of this character — and the article on the closely related product next door contains none of the character encoded for that either.
It appears twice in CLDR's annotation data and once as a chart cell, in each case being defined rather than used. Encyclopaedia prose about a cosmetic writes the word.
Pages change; this is what those showed on the day.
FAQ
Why does the nail polish take a skin tone and this one not?
Because skin-tone modifiers attach only to characters showing human skin. A hand qualifies; a tube does not.
Is this the kiss emoji?
No. The kiss mark is a separate character depicting the print left behind.
Does the standard say what colour it is?
No. There is no annotation on this character at all, including nothing about depiction.
Is there an HTML entity?
No named one. Write 💄 or 💄.