Skin Tone Variants
A Saskatchewan judge ruled in 2023 that this gesture can sign a contract. A grain buyer had texted a photo of a flax delivery agreement with the words "Please confirm flax contract"; the farmer replied with a thumbs up, the flax never came, and the court held that the emoji satisfied the requirements of both acceptance and signature. Damages came to just over CAD 82,000. The Court of Appeal upheld the decision in 2024, though it stressed that the two men had years of history closing deals by text — a thumbs up is not automatically a yes. Canada's Supreme Court declined to hear the matter in July 2025, so the ruling stands.
The irony is that the gesture is getting less clear rather than more. Since a widely shared 2022 forum post there has been a steady argument that younger users read a bare thumbs up as curt, even passive-aggressive — a way to end a conversation rather than endorse something. Be careful how much weight you put on that. The one poll usually cited asked two thousand British sixteen-to-twenty-nine-year-olds which emoji make you look old, not which ones read as rude, and this topped that list. Seeming dated is not the same as seeming hostile.
Encoded in 2010, it takes all five skin-tone modifiers.
About Thumbs Up
Thumbs Up is the Unicode character 👍 at codepoint U+1F44D 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 Thumbs Up
To use the Thumbs Up 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: '\1F44D';.
In JavaScript and TypeScript the escape '\u{1F44D}' evaluates to 👍. In Python source, write '\U0001F44D'.
The character encodes to F0 9F 91 8D as UTF-8 bytes and D83D DC4D as UTF-16 code units. Its decimal codepoint is 128077.
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.