Ask anyone under thirty what this means and death will not be the first answer. "I'm dead" — as in, that was so funny it killed me — took over around 2021, when it became received wisdom online that the laughing-crying face belonged to the old and the skull was the correct way to signal being finished off by a joke.
It is worth being precise about what actually happened, because the story got flattened in the retelling. The claim traces to a single Emojipedia piece in February 2021 that mainstream outlets picked up en masse. What that piece reported was a shift in perceived coolness, not in volume: face with tears of joy remained the single most-used emoji on Twitter through both 2020 and 2021, and the skull did not crack the top ten. One was declared uncool while comfortably outpolling the thing meant to be replacing it.
Do not confuse it with skull and crossbones, a different character in a different block with a much older and more literal job — Unicode's own note on that one reads simply "poison". The plain skull carries none of that freight, which is presumably what left it free to be repurposed as a laugh.
About Skull
Skull is the Unicode character 💀 at codepoint U+1F480 in the Miscellaneous Symbols and Pictographs 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 Skull
To use the Skull 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: '\1F480';.
In JavaScript and TypeScript the escape '\u{1F480}' evaluates to 💀. In Python source, write '\U0001F480'.
The character encodes to F0 9F 92 80 as UTF-8 bytes and D83D DC80 as UTF-16 code units. Its decimal codepoint is 128128.
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.