🥲 is the Smiling Face with a Tear emoji, and it means bittersweet — happy and sad at the same time. People send it for proud goodbyes, grateful moments, and small disappointments they're laughing off. Tap the button above to copy 🥲 instantly.
Smiling Face with a Tear
Tear Emoji 🥲
The bittersweet one — copy 🥲, then see exactly how people use it
🥲 is the emoji for feelings that refuse to pick a side. Unicode named it Smiling Face with Tear and it shipped in 2021, which makes it one of the newest emoji in heavy daily rotation — and unlike 😢 or 😭, the mouth is genuinely smiling. That single design choice is the whole meaning. You send it when the good thing and the sad thing are the same thing: the last day at a job you loved, watching a friend move away for a great opportunity, a pet's final vet visit, your kid's first day of school. It also carries a second, more casual life as the internet's favorite coping emoji. "Third overdraft fee this month 🥲" isn't a cry for help — it's a shrug with a smile taped over it, the digital version of laughing so you don't scream. Gen Z leans hard on this ironic register; millennials tend to use it more sincerely, for gratitude and pride. Both readings work, and the surrounding message almost always makes clear which one you're getting.
✍️ Written & reviewed against real usage · verified Unicode 16.0
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Tear emojis to copy & paste
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.
Tear & related emojis
Tear combos
What the tear emoji means
The meaning of 🥲 sits exactly on the seam between two emotions, and the design tells you so: an ordinary closed-mouth smile with one tear on the cheek. Not a grimace, not a sob — a smile that is holding. In practice it covers three overlapping reads. First, bittersweet: something is ending and you're glad it happened. Second, grateful-overwhelmed: a compliment or a kind gesture that got past your defenses. Third, and increasingly the dominant one online, resigned humor — bad news delivered with a smile because complaining is boring. The tell is what the emoji is attached to. Follow good news and it's sincere. Follow a bill, a delay, or a favor you didn't want to do, and it's the polite face people make when something is not fine. Nothing about it is loud, which is precisely why it gets used constantly: 🥲 is the only emoji that lets you admit a feeling without escalating it.
🎓
Milestones and endings
Graduations, last shifts, moving days, final games. 🥲 is the default caption emoji when something good is ending — it lets you celebrate without pretending you're not sad.
🫠
Coping humor
"Rent went up again 🥲" — Gen Z uses it as a soft laugh at bad news. It signals "I'm fine, in the way people say they're fine," which is funnier than an outright sad face.
🥹
Compliment replies
Someone says something kind and 🥲 answers it — touched, slightly overwhelmed, not crying. It's the polite reply that avoids the intensity of 😭 or the coldness of 🙂.
🎬
Reaction to content
Comment sections on TikTok and Reels use it for videos that are sweet and a little devastating: military homecomings, adoption clips, elderly couples. Happy-crying without the drama.
💼
Work-safe sadness
In Slack and work group chats, 🥲 is the sanctioned way to say something is going badly. "Deploy failed again 🥲" reads as rueful, not as a complaint HR needs to read.
See it in real chats
How 🥲 actually lands in a real thread
last day at the old office today 🥲
the 🥲 is doing so much work there
genuinely happy about the new job but i cried in the parking lot lol
that's the exact emoji for that. proud of you 🫶
Q. What does 🥲 mean from a girl or guy?
When someone sends 🥲, they're telling you they've decided to be okay about something. It's a self-managed emotion — the sender is processing, not asking you to fix anything. That's why it reads as emotionally mature rather than needy: they've paired the hard part with a smile before handing it to you. It's rarely flirtatious. What it does say is that the person is comfortable being a little vulnerable with you and trusts you to catch the subtext without an explanation. Meeting it with warmth ("that's a lot, proud of you") lands far better than trying to cheer them up.
🥲 vs 🥹 — the mix-up almost everyone makes
Smiling Face with a Tear 🥲 and Face Holding Back Tears 🥹 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.
🥲
Smiling Face with a Tear
Calm closed smile, one tear already on the cheek. The feeling has been processed. Use it for bittersweet endings, quiet gratitude, and bad news you're shrugging off with a joke. Lower intensity, often a little ironic.
vs
🥹
Face Holding Back Tears
Big glassy welling eyes, wobbling mouth, no tear falling yet. The feeling is happening right now. Use it for being genuinely moved, overwhelmed by kindness, or nearly crying at something sweet. Higher intensity, almost never ironic.
How 🥲 looks on every platform
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:
🥲
Your device
Twitter / X
Google (Noto)
OpenMoji
Platform
How it differs
iMessage / iOS
Apple's 🥲 is the most restrained version: a soft yellow smile with a small tear low on the left cheek. At chat size it can read as a plain 🙂, so people often pair it with text that makes the mood explicit.
TikTok
Dominant in comments on emotional videos and in captions about being broke, tired, or overwhelmed. Doubling it (🥲🥲) intensifies the joke; a single one under a sweet video reads as sincere.
Snapchat
Common in captions on last-day and goodbye snaps. Note it is not a Snapchat friend emoji — it has no streak or best-friend meaning, so it always means what the sender typed it to mean.
Android / Google
Google's Noto version has a larger, more defined teardrop and a wider smile, making the bittersweet reading much more obvious than Apple's. Samsung One UI is similar, with a glossier tear.
WhatsApp
Renders close to Apple's design with a slightly brighter tear. Widely used in family groups for milestone messages — weddings, births, someone flying home.
Slack / Teams
The safe way to flag frustration at work. "Build broke again 🥲" reads as good-humored rather than as an escalation, which is why it's become office shorthand for mild professional suffering.
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).
Where 🥲 gets misread
The tear 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.
It is not a plain crying emoji, and using it that way confuses people. If you are actually upset and want support, 😢 or 😭 are unambiguous. 🥲 tells the reader you have already made peace with it, so they may not check on you.
Attached to a request or an obligation it turns passive-aggressive fast. "Sure I'll cover your shift 🥲" reads as a guilt trip whether or not you meant one. If you genuinely don't mind, drop the emoji or use 👍.
Rendering varies more than you'd expect. Apple's version is subtle — a small tear on one cheek that is easy to miss at chat size. Samsung and Google draw a bigger, more obvious teardrop, so the same message can look mildly wistful on iPhone and openly weepy on Android.
It is invisible or boxed on genuinely old software. Because it only arrived in 2021, systems left on pre-Emoji-13.1 fonts — old Windows builds, unpatched smart TVs, some enterprise chat clients — show a tofu box instead. Don't use it as the only emotional cue in a message that has to land.
The myth that it means "tears of joy" is wrong. Tears of joy is 😂, which is laughing, not moved. 🥲 is closer to relief or resignation, and reading it as pure happiness will make you misjudge messages that were quietly telling you something is hard.
Frequently asked
Quick answers to what people ask most about the tear emoji 🥲 — what it means in a text, who tends to send it, and how to copy it onto your own keyboard.
What does 🥲 mean when someone sends it?
It means the sender is happy, grateful, or resigned about something that also hurts a little. Genuine smile, one tear. Read it as "this is good and I'm still emotional about it," not as a request for comfort.
Is 🥲 sad or happy?
Both, deliberately. The mouth is smiling, not frowning — that's the whole design. Unicode calls it "Smiling Face with Tear" and describes it as pride, relief, or gratitude mixed with sadness. If someone were purely sad they'd send 😢 or 😭.
What's the difference between 🥲 and 🥹?
🥲 has a closed smile and a single tear already falling — bittersweet, often a bit resigned. 🥹 has huge welling eyes and a wobbling mouth — overwhelmed, holding it back, usually a warmer and more urgent feeling. 🥹 says "I'm about to cry," 🥲 says "I already did."
Is 🥲 passive-aggressive?
It can be. "Sure, no problem 🥲" is a well-known way to agree while making the cost visible. Context decides: attached to good news it's sincere, attached to a task or a favor it often reads as a quiet complaint.
Does 🥲 mean someone is flirting?
Usually no. It has almost no romantic charge — it's an emotion emoji, not a signal emoji. On dating apps it typically shows up in self-deprecating lines about bad dates or busy schedules, which reads as approachable rather than interested.
When was 🥲 added?
It arrived in Emoji 13.1 and shipped to phones through 2021 — iOS 14.5 in April 2021 and Android 12. That's why it feels distinctly modern: it has no early-2010s baggage, which is part of why Gen Z adopted it so fast.
How do I type 🥲 without copying it?
On iPhone and Android, search "tear" in the emoji keyboard — it appears alongside 😢 and 😭. On Windows press Win + . (period) and search "tear"; on Mac press Control + Command + Space. Otherwise just copy it from the button above.
Related emoji guides
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.
