Most Popular Emojis of 2025: Usage Statistics, Trends & Data

Global Emoji Usage in 2025

Over six billion emoji are sent every single day across major messaging platforms. That number has roughly doubled since 2020, driven by the growth of WhatsApp (2.7 billion users), iMessage, and workplace tools like Slack and Teams. In 2025, emoji usage data has become a genuine window into how people communicate, what they care about, and how digital expression evolves across cultures and generations.

Here is the latest data and what it tells us about the world.

The Top 20 Most Used Emoji Globally

Based on aggregated data from major messaging platforms, social media analytics, and Unicode Consortium reports, here are the emoji that dominate global usage in 2025:

1. 😂 Face with Tears of Joy — still holding the top spot, though its lead has narrowed

2. ❤️ Red Heart — the universal symbol of love and affection

3. 🤣 Rolling on the Floor Laughing — has been climbing steadily since 2022

4. 👍 Thumbs Up — the quintessential approval gesture

5. 😭 Loudly Crying Face — increasingly used for both sadness and overwhelming joy

6. 🙏 Folded Hands — prayer, gratitude, or "please" depending on context

7. 😘 Face Blowing a Kiss — romantic and friendly affection

8. 🥰 Smiling Face with Hearts — expressing love and warm feelings

9. 😍 Heart Eyes — adoration and excitement

10. 😊 Smiling Face with Smiling Eyes — warmth and sincerity

11. 🎉 Party Popper — celebrations and congratulations

12. 🔥 Fire — "hot," exciting, or impressive

13. 😁 Beaming Face with Smiling Eyes — happiness and enthusiasm

14. 💕 Two Hearts — love and close relationships

15. 🥺 Pleading Face — the "puppy eyes" effect

16. 😅 Grinning Face with Sweat — relief or slight embarrassment

17. 🤦 Person Facepalming — disbelief or frustration

18. 🤷 Person Shrugging — uncertainty or indifference

19. 🙄 Face with Rolling Eyes — annoyance or sarcasm

20. ✨ Sparkles — emphasis, magic, or aesthetic flair

The Dethroning Nobody Expected

For years, 😂 has been the undisputed champion. But in 2025, its dominance is under serious threat. The crying face 😭 has surged in popularity, particularly among younger demographics (Gen Z and Gen Alpha), who use it to express not just sadness but overwhelming emotion of any kind — joy, laughter, disbelief, or being deeply moved.

I have been tracking this shift for about two years now, and it is fascinating. According to Emojipedia's usage analytics, on platforms like TikTok and Twitter/X, 😭 has already overtaken 😂 in many contexts. The phrase "I am literally crying" paired with 😭 often means "this is hilarious" rather than genuine sadness. This semantic shift mirrors how language evolves — emoji meanings are not fixed, they drift with cultural use.

Platform-Specific Differences

One of the most interesting aspects of emoji usage data is how it varies across platforms. Each platform has its own culture, and that culture shapes emoji preferences.

WhatsApp

WhatsApp, being the world's most-used messaging app with over 2.7 billion users, shows emoji patterns that reflect personal communication. Heart emoji dominate here — ❤, 💕, 😘, and 🥰 all rank higher on WhatsApp than on other platforms. This makes sense: WhatsApp is where people talk to family, close friends, and romantic partners.

The thumbs up 👍 is also disproportionately popular on WhatsApp. It serves as a quick acknowledgment, the digital equivalent of a nod. Many conversations end with a thumbs up because it is the fastest way to say "got it" or "sounds good."

Twitter/X

Twitter shows a very different pattern. The 🔥 fire emoji and 💀 skull rank much higher here than on other platforms. Twitter culture rewards wit, hot takes, and hyperbolic reactions. Saying something is "fire" or "I am dead" (with 💀) is standard Twitter vernacular.

Political and news discussions on Twitter also boost certain emoji. The 🤡 clown face, used to mock something perceived as foolish, and the side-eye 👀, used to call attention to something noteworthy, both rank significantly higher on Twitter than elsewhere.

Instagram

Instagram's visual-first culture means that aesthetic emoji thrive here. Sparkles ✨, the butterfly 🦋, the cherry blossom 🌸, and various heart colors are used heavily in captions and comments. Instagram users tend to use emoji as decoration as much as communication.

The camera emoji 📸 and the pointing down gesture 👇 (used for "link in bio" or "check below") are also Instagram-specific favorites.

TikTok

TikTok has its own emoji dialect. The skull 💀 reigns supreme here — it is the standard way of saying something is hilariously funny. The chair emoji 🪑 had a viral moment as a joke replacement for 💀 (because "chair" sounds like a laugh in some contexts), demonstrating how TikTok can create entirely new emoji meanings overnight.

Niche emoji like the 🗿 moyai (used for deadpan humor), the 🧠 brain (for clever observations), and the 🗣 speaking head (for gossip or bold statements) are all much more popular on TikTok than on other platforms.

Workplace Platforms (Slack, Teams)

Professional messaging tools show a completely different emoji profile. The thumbs up 👍, checkmark ✅, eyes 👀, and prayer/thank you 🙏 dominate. These emoji serve functional purposes — acknowledgment, task completion, attention, and gratitude.

The slightly smiling face 🙂 has developed a passive-aggressive connotation in workplace settings. What was designed as a friendly smile is now often perceived as "I am annoyed but being professional about it." I have seen entire articles and Reddit threads devoted to decoding 🙂 in work messages.

Regional Differences: Emoji Around the World

Global emoji statistics mask fascinating regional variations. What is popular in Japan is not necessarily popular in Brazil, and vice versa.

Japan

Japan, the birthplace of emoji, has distinct usage patterns. Emoji like 🙇 (bowing), 💮 (white flower, used for "well done" in schools), and various food emoji (🍣🍱🍙) rank much higher in Japan. The face characters tend to be the simpler ones — 😊 and 😄 over more exaggerated expressions.

Japanese users also use kaomoji (text-based emoticons like (╥﹏╥) and (◕‿◕)) alongside emoji more than users in other countries, creating a richer palette of expression.

Brazil

Brazil is one of the heaviest emoji-using countries in the world. Heart emoji absolutely dominate — Brazilians send more hearts per capita than almost any other nationality. The country flag 🇧🇷 is also extremely popular, reflecting strong national pride in digital communication.

Brazilian Portuguese internet culture has its own emoji conventions. The upside-down face 🙃 is used somewhat differently — more as playful sarcasm than passive aggression.

Middle East

In Arabic-speaking countries, the folded hands 🙏 emoji ranks exceptionally high, often used in religious and cultural contexts. Rose emoji 🌹 are more popular here than in most other regions, used as a gesture of respect and warmth.

France

The French show unusually high usage of the kissing face emoji 😘, which aligns with cultural communication styles. France also shows higher usage of food and wine emoji compared to the global average — 🥐🍷🧀 are all overrepresented.

South Korea

South Korea has unique emoji preferences shaped by K-culture. Heart emoji are incredibly popular, but Korean users show a strong preference for newer, more specific heart variants. The Korean heart gesture (made by crossing thumb and index finger) became an emoji candidate partly due to Korean cultural influence on global pop culture.

Year-Over-Year Trends

The Rise of Expressive Faces

Looking at multi-year trends, the biggest shift is toward more specific emotional expression. Simple smiley faces are declining in relative usage, while complex emotional emoji are rising. Faces like 🥹 (face holding back tears), 🫠 (melting face), and 🫣 (face with peeking eye) — all relatively recent additions from Unicode 14.0 — have seen explosive adoption.

This suggests that as the emoji vocabulary expands, people gravitate toward emoji that express more specific, subtle emotions. We are moving from a world of "happy" and "sad" emoji to one with dozens of emotional gradations.

Gesture Emoji Are Booming

Hand gesture emoji have seen consistent growth. The shrug 🤷, facepalm 🤦, 🤌 pinched fingers (the Italian chef's kiss of emoji, added in Unicode 13.0), and 🫶 heart hands are all climbing the charts. Gestures translate well across cultures and add physical expressiveness to text that face emoji alone cannot provide.

Nature and Object Emoji Find Symbolic Uses

Many emoji designed to represent literal objects have taken on entirely symbolic meanings. The 💀 skull does not mean death — it means something is extremely funny. The 🔥 fire does not mean flames — it means something is impressive. The 🧢 cap does not mean hat — it means someone is lying ("cap" = lie in Gen Z slang, so "no cap" = "no lie").

This symbolic repurposing is one of the most creative aspects of emoji evolution. It demonstrates that emoji are not just icons — they are a living language that users actively shape and redefine.

Demographic Patterns

Age Differences

The generational emoji gap is real and growing. Older millennials and Gen X tend to use emoji more literally — a thumbs up means approval, a smiley face means happiness. Younger generations use emoji more symbolically and ironically.

Gen Z has effectively retired several emoji. The slightly smiling face 🙂, the OK hand 👌, and the thumbs up 👍 are all perceived as passive-aggressive or "boomer" by younger users. Meanwhile, emoji that seem random to older users — like the skull, the moai, or the speaking head — are core vocabulary for Gen Z.

Gender Patterns

Research shows some gender-based differences in emoji usage, though these are averages with significant overlap. Women tend to use more heart emoji and face emoji overall. Men show higher usage of the fire emoji, sporting emoji, and the fist bump. Both genders use the laughing and crying faces at roughly equal rates.

These patterns are shifting as emoji culture becomes more universal, and individual variation far outweighs gender-based trends.

Numbers That Tell a Story

After spending considerable time analyzing emoji statistics, a few big-picture insights stand out to me.

First, emoji are not replacing language — they are enhancing it. The most-used emoji are emotional modifiers and social signals, not substitutes for words. People use them to add tone, emphasis, and emotion to text that would otherwise feel flat.

Second, emoji usage reflects cultural values. The emoji people choose reveal what they care about communicating — affection, humor, approval, and celebration consistently top the charts across all regions and demographics.

Third, emoji are evolving faster than most people realize. The meanings of individual emoji shift, new emoji get adopted rapidly, and platform-specific dialects emerge and spread. What was a niche TikTok emoji trend six months ago can become global standard usage fast.

Finally, the sheer scale of emoji usage is staggering. Over 10 billion emoji are sent daily across major messaging platforms alone. They appear in emails, documents, code comments, legal proceedings, and even academic papers. Emoji have become as fundamental to digital communication as punctuation.

Business and Marketing Data

Marketing data from 2025 shows that including emoji in email subject lines increases open rates by about 15 percent compared to text-only subject lines. That effect is slowly shrinking as emoji in marketing become more common and less novel, but it still works.

Social media posts with emoji pull roughly 25 percent higher engagement (likes, comments, shares) than posts without. The effect is strongest on Instagram and weakest on LinkedIn, where too many emoji can come across as unprofessional.

Push notifications with emoji show a 20 percent higher click-through rate than text-only notifications. The red circle (notification badge look) and the fire emoji are particularly effective at driving taps.

Over 60 percent of brands now use emoji in customer service interactions on social media. The most common brand emoji: folded hands (thank you), red heart (appreciation), and smiling face (friendliness). Customer satisfaction data suggests emoji use in support messages increases perceived warmth — but using them in response to complaints backfires. Context matters.

In the workplace, 76 percent of knowledge workers use emoji in messaging at least once per day. The thumbs up dominates as a "received" or "agreed" signal. About 35 percent of workers report having had a workplace miscommunication caused by emoji ambiguity — the slightly smiling face (sincere or passive-aggressive?), thumbs up (agreement or dismissal?), and folded hands (gratitude or begging?) are the top offenders.

Numbers That Might Catch You Off Guard

The 100 most-used emoji account for 82 percent of all emoji usage. The remaining 3,600+ emoji share just 18 percent. Most emoji are used very rarely.

The average smartphone user has accessed fewer than 200 unique emoji in their lifetime. Despite having 3,700+ available, most people work with a personal vocabulary of under 100.

The flag emoji category has over 250 flags — the largest single category. Yet flag emoji collectively account for less than 0.5 percent of all usage. The most-used flag (American flag) does not even crack the top 100 overall.

Emoji usage peaks on Friday evenings and drops to its lowest on Tuesday mornings. This pattern holds across cultures and platforms, suggesting a universal link between leisure time and expressive digital communication.

Japan, where emoji originated, now ranks only seventh in per-capita emoji usage, behind Brazil, Indonesia, the Philippines, Argentina, Colombia, and Mexico.

Predictions for the Rest of 2025

Based on current trends, here is what I expect for the remainder of 2025:

The crying face 😭 will likely overtake 😂 as the most-used emoji globally, completing a shift that has been building for three years.

New emoji from the Unicode 16.0 release will see rapid adoption, particularly any new face expressions and gesture emoji.

AI-influenced communication will increase emoji usage in professional contexts, as AI writing assistants normalize emoji in business communication.

Regional emoji cultures will continue to diverge, with platform-specific and country-specific emoji dialects becoming more distinct.

The data is clear: emoji are not a fad. They are a permanent, evolving layer of human communication. And understanding how people use them — really use them, not how we assume they use them — reveals more about digital culture than almost any other data source I have encountered.