Drooling Face (U+1F924) - what it really means in texts, DMs and TikTok comments
The drool emoji 🤤 (Drooling Face, U+1F924) means intense wanting. People send it for craveable food, attractive people, and desirable things. Secondary meaning: sleepy or dazed. In flirty DMs it signals attraction; on food posts it just means hungry.
✍️ Written & reviewed against real usage · verified Unicode 16.0Tap to copy · pastes in WhatsApp, Instagram, anywhere
These are the real emoji characters — tap one to copy it, then paste anywhere. Because they’re text, they show up as emoji wherever you send them.
Unicode calls it Drooling Face, and the original design intent was closer to sleepy than hungry - a face so relaxed or dazed that saliva escapes. That reading survives, but it lost. In everyday messaging 🤤 has become the internet's shorthand for appetite in the broadest sense: I want that, right now. Food is the anchor use - a cheese pull, a plated steak, a bakery window - and from there it spread to anything desirable. Sneakers, cars, hotel infinity pools, a build in a game, a paycheck screenshot. The same face goes under a gym selfie or a celebrity edit, where the craving becomes physical attraction and the emoji turns into a thirst reaction. What makes 🤤 useful is that it is honest but deniable. It admits wanting something in a cartoonish, exaggerated way, so nobody has to treat it as a serious statement. That is why it thrives in comment sections: strong signal, low commitment. Tone shifts almost entirely with the emoji next to it. With 🍕 or 🍰 it is food. With 🥵 or 🔥 it is attraction. With 😴 it is tiredness. With 👀 it is a nudge to look at something. Alone under a person's photo, most readers will assume flirting.
The safest, most common use. Sent under a recipe reel, a dinner photo or a restaurant story to mean "that looks unreal, I want it." Nobody reads it as flirting in a food context.
Under a gym selfie, fit pic or celebrity edit, 🤤 is open, joking attraction. Paired with 🥵 or 🔥 it stops being about food entirely and becomes "you look good and I am not hiding it."
Sneaker drops, new phones, cars, hotel rooms. Drooling face works for any object of desire, which is why brand accounts use it constantly in captions and comments.
The literal reading: passed out, drooling on the pillow, zoned out in class. Often paired with 😴 or used to caption a nap photo or a 3am reply.
When a girl sends 🤤, check what it is attached to before you get excited. Under a food photo, a recipe or a restaurant story it means exactly what it looks like - that looks delicious - and it carries no romantic weight at all. That is the majority of uses. But sent as a reaction to your selfie, gym photo, new haircut or fit pic, 🤤 is deliberate, low-risk flirting: she is saying you look good while keeping it jokey enough to laugh off if you do not reciprocate. The tell is what surrounds it. A bare 🤤 under your picture, or 🤤 with 🥵 🔥 👀, is interest. A 🤤 buried in a group chat about pizza is not. Doubling or tripling it (🤤🤤🤤) usually amps up the humour rather than the sincerity - it is closer to a cartoon reaction than a confession. And if she sends it with 😴 late at night, she is telling you she is half asleep, not thirsty.
Drooling Face 🤤 and Face Savoring Food 😋 look closely related and get swapped constantly, but they land differently in a message. Here is what separates them, so you send the one you actually mean.
Anticipation. The mouth waters because you have not got it yet. Use it under food you want, a person you find attractive, or a product you cannot afford.
Satisfaction, or cheekiness. A licking-lips smile used after eating something good, or to soften a playful, slightly mischievous message. Less thirsty, more smug.
It’s the same character everywhere — each platform just draws it in its own style. Here are three open emoji sets side by side, plus how your own device renders it:
| Platform | How it differs |
|---|---|
| Apple / iOS | Soft yellow face, eyes half closed, a single glossy drip falling from the left corner of a slack smile. The most sleepy-looking major version - it still reads as dozy as much as hungry. |
| Google / Android | Wider open mouth with a thicker, longer drool strand and more relaxed brows. Reads hungrier and more comedic than Apple's, which suits food-comment use. |
| Samsung | Rounder face and a bigger, more cartoonish droplet that hangs lower. Older One UI versions showed the eyes fully closed, pushing the sleepy meaning harder. |
| X (Twitter) | Flat Twemoji style, simple curved mouth with one blue-tinted drop. Minimal shading, so at timeline size it can look more like a smirk than a drool. |
| Close to the Apple rendering with slightly brighter drool. Renders fine on every WhatsApp build since 2017, so it is safe for cross-platform group chats. |
Apple, Samsung and WhatsApp draw their own proprietary versions, which we don’t redistribute — the notes above describe how they differ. Open sets shown under their licences: Twemoji (CC-BY 4.0), Noto Emoji (Apache 2.0), OpenMoji (CC BY-SA 4.0).
The drool emoji 🤤 is not always read the way you intend it. These three situations change what 🤤 signals, and knowing them keeps you from sending the wrong message.
Quick answers to what people ask most about the drool emoji 🤤 — what it means in a text, who tends to send it, and how to copy it onto your own keyboard.
Usually the same as from anyone else: strong wanting. Under food, it is hunger. Under a selfie or a fit pic, it is open, low-effort flirting - he is telling you he likes what he sees without writing a real compliment. If he sends it alongside 🥵 or 🔥, read it as attraction, not appetite.
It depends entirely on context. On food, memes and products it is harmless. Sent to a stranger's photo or to someone who did not invite it, it reads as thirsty and can feel objectifying, because the face is literally salivating over a person. Between friends or people already flirting, it is playful.
😋 (face savoring food) is a licking-lips smile - happy, satisfied, often after eating or a cheeky joke. 🤤 (drooling face) is anticipation - the mouth is watering before you get it. 😋 says "that was good." 🤤 says "I want that."
In comments it is the standard reaction to food videos, cooking ASMR, thirst traps, edits of a favourite character and any "POV" clip about something desirable. Creators also stack it in captions - "new recipe 🤤" - because it signals craving in one character.
It is Drooling Face, U+1F924, shortcode :drooling_face:. It was approved in Unicode 9.0 and Emoji 3.0 in 2016, so it is supported on essentially every current phone, and it sits in the Smileys and Emotion category.
Yes. The original design is a face drooling because it is dozing off or dazed. People still use it that way for naps, late-night texts, boring lectures and "I fell asleep mid-sentence" moments, usually next to 😴 to make the sleepy reading obvious.
If 🤤 came up in a conversation, these are the emoji people most often look up next — each one explained the same way, with meanings you can actually use and characters you can copy.