Person Shrugging Emoji 🤷

The shrug emoji in text form is actually called a kaomodji. Kaomoji is a popular Japanese emoticon style made of Japanese katakana alphabet and punctuation. This particular kaomodji was created with a character ツ (tsu) to represent a pair of eyes and a smirking mouth, and various other Unicode characters, which together form shrugging arms. Shrugging Person is a way of describing your condition, when you don't know the solution to some problem, and the whole situation seems a real mess, but you couldn't care less:

Small business: We are not working due to coronavirus lockdown. How are we supposed to pay our rent?

Government: ¯\_(ツ)_/¯

There are various theories about how it was born. First, it seems to be a successful visualisation of the popular meme “I Dunno LOL”. It describes a reaction when you don’t know the answer, and the quesstion itself is puzzling. A shrug japanese emoji carries a tinge of funny despair and has an intonation of a rhetorical question.

The shrugging text guy became virus on the Internet back in 2009, when Kanye West spoiled the 2009 MTV Video Music Awards by interrupting Taylor Swift’s award acceptance speech. He walked onto the stage to say that Beyoncé, her opponent, had one of the best videos of all time! Being sorry for what he just did, he shrugged and handed the microphone back to Swift and then left the stage. That is how the man shrug emoji was made, and it instantly became popular on Twitter.

Shrug Emoji

¯\_(ツ)_/¯ have been popular long enough to get its own Emoji 🤷‍♀️. This emoji is also known as “Shruggie”.

At the moment Shruggie has different skin tones and genders. In Emoji table you can see girl and boys shrugging in puzzlement.

How to make the Shrug Emoji ¯\_(ツ)_/¯?

The “smugshrug” symbol is one of the most difficult emoticons to type. It consists of several symbols, and you have to type each symbol separately. It is much easier to select shrug emoji on our website, copy and paste: ¯\_(ツ)_/¯.

The symbol “Person Shrugging” is included in the “Portrait and role symbols” subblock of the “Supplemental Symbols and Pictographs” block and was approved as part of Unicode version 9.0 in 2016. In 2016, it was also approved as an Emoji in version 3.0 and added to the “Person Gesture” subcategory of the “People & Body” category.