Face Vomiting 🤮 — what it means in texts, DMs and TikTok, and when it is literal
The throw up emoji 🤮 is Face Vomiting. Online it mostly means extreme disgust or rejection, not illness, used to reject an ex, an opinion, an outfit or a food combo. Literal sickness use survives only when context makes it obvious.
✍️ 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 drew 🤮 as a literal medical face, but the internet almost immediately repurposed it as a volume knob for disgust. The physical act is the metaphor: this is so bad my body rejected it. That is why it shows up under bad opinions, ex-boyfriends, pineapple-on-pizza arguments and outfits, far more than under actual stomach bugs. It sits at the top of a small ladder — 😖 is annoyed, 🤢 is queasy, 🤮 is done — and people genuinely climb it inside a single conversation. There is a second, smaller register: ironic swoon, where 😍🤮 means something is so sweet or so over-the-top romantic that it is nauseating, which is closer to affection than to hatred. And there is the sincere register, which needs company to be read correctly. Alone, 🤮 after "how was last night" means hungover. Alone, 🤮 after a screenshot means the screenshot is vile. The emoji does not change; the thing it points at does all the work.
Usually not literal. It is a loud "ew, no" aimed at a person, an opinion, or something someone just said. The physical read only kicks in when the message is about being ill.
Reaction currency. Someone sends a screenshot of an ex, a cringe pickup line or a bad outfit, and 🤮 is the whole reply. It ends the conversation on that item.
Comment-section verdict on couples people dislike, food combos, or "unpopular opinion" videos. Stacked three or four times to signal the take is genuinely unbearable, not just mid.
Real use survives: food poisoning, hangovers, motion sickness, morning sickness, stomach bugs. Context makes it obvious, and it is usually paired with 🚽, 🧻 or 🤒.
When a girl sends 🤮 she is almost never talking about you, and she is almost never talking about her stomach. It is a verdict on a third party: the ex who texted, the guy who slid into her DMs, the coworker's comment, the outfit in the group chat. It means "ew, absolutely not, do not defend this" and it invites you to agree, loudly. Reading it as a genuine health update is the most common mistake. The one time to slow down: if 🤮 lands directly after something you said, it is a light-hearted but real signal the joke was too much, and the graceful move is to change subject rather than double down. And if it shows up beside 🚽, 🧻 or "I feel awful," take it literally and ask if she is okay.
Nauseated Face 🤢 and Face Vomiting 🤮 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.
Green and unwell but mouth closed. Reads as mild disgust, a bad feeling, or "this is off." Softer, more deniable, safer to send to someone you do not know well.
The escalation. Mouth open, green stream out. Reads as total rejection with no room left for politeness, whether the target is a person, an opinion or a plate of food.
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 | Bright green-yellow face with a wide open mouth and a thick stream of green vomit; the most extreme-looking version, which is why it reads so loud in iMessage. |
| Softer green face, smaller neat spray, eyes squeezed shut. Reads more "unwell" than "disgusted" compared with Apple's. | |
| Samsung | Rounder face with a distinctly green tint and a shorter burst; older One UI versions looked closer to plain nausea than vomiting. |
| Yellow face with a green flush only around the mouth, so on some screens it can be mistaken for 🤢 in small reaction sizes. | |
| Twitter / X | Flat, simplified Twemoji rendering with a blunt green stream; scales well but loses the exaggerated grimace the Apple version carries. |
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 throw up 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 throw up emoji 🤮 — what it means in a text, who tends to send it, and how to copy it onto your own keyboard.
Officially it is Face Vomiting: a green-tinged face with its mouth open and green vomit coming out. In practice it means intense disgust or rejection of something someone said, wore, posted or did, and only sometimes means actual sickness.
🤢 Nauseated Face is queasy but holding it in, so it reads as mild disgust or feeling off. 🤮 Face Vomiting has already lost the battle, so it reads as maximum disgust. People often send 🤢 first, then escalate to 🤮.
It can be. Aimed at a thing (a food, a take, a situation) it is normal internet shorthand. Aimed at a person's face, body, art or photo it lands as an insult, and screenshots of it age badly. Never use it in work chats.
Almost always disgust at a third party or a topic, not at you. It is a fast way of saying "ew, absolutely not" about an ex, a creep, a bad outfit or a gross story. If it follows something you said, it is a soft warning that the joke did not land.
It is a comment-section verdict. Under couples, food hacks, fashion or hot takes, 🤮 means the commenter finds it genuinely unbearable. Repeating it two or three times raises the volume rather than changing the meaning.
Face Vomiting was approved as part of Unicode 10.0 in 2017 and released with Emoji 5.0 the same year, alongside 🤯 Exploding Head and 🤭 Face with Hand Over Mouth.
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.