About

Pleading Emoji (🥺), also known as Begging Emoji and Simp Emoji, is an emoji face with furrowed eyebrows and "puppy dog" eyes looking slightly upward as if begging or pleading. Added to Unicode in June 2018, the emoji has since achieved significant virality on social media, where it was laden with a variety of meanings ranging from expressing shyness and being sorry to conveying more nuanced meanings such as simping. The emoji is also referred to as Bottom Emoji due to its perceived association with people who take on a passive role during intercourse. The emoticon is also often used together with the Two Fingers Touching 👉👈 emoji combination.

Origin

On June 5th, 2018, Unicode version 11.0 was released.^[1] The release introduced several dozen new emojis, including an emoji officially called Face with Pleading Eyes (emoji appearance on various devices and apps shown below).^[2]

Spread

While the emoji was released in mid-2018, it did not achieve virality until early 2020. According to data analysis, the emoji started rapidly climbing to popularity in August 2019, becoming the third most used emoji on Twitter in early 2020,^[3] and was the third most used emoji on Twitter in 2020^[4] and 2021,^[5] behind only the Face with Tears of Joy and Loudly Crying Face.

The popularization of the emoji in early 2020 is tied to the simultaneous popularization of the Two Fingers Touching emoji combination, with Pleading Emoji and the two fingers often used together. Notably, on February 26th, 2020, artist Lil Nas X made a tweet^[6] that gained over 32,000 retweets and 330,200 likes in two years (shown below, left). Later that day, Twitter^[7] user @GoDiegitoGo made a similar tweet that gained over 24,100 retweets and 88,700 likes in the same period (shown below, right). Both posts assisted the popularization of the Pleading Emoji and the Two Fingers Touching emoji combination in the following months.

On March 28th, 2020, Twitter^[8] user @ayyy_vuh joked that 🥺 is "bottom speak," meaning that the emoji is used exclusively by those who "bottom" (are a receiving partner) during intercourse. The tweet gained over 45,200 retweets and 323,900 likes in two years (shown below).

On April 24th, 2020, the emoji encyclopedia website Emojipedia^[3] published an article titled "A New King: Pleading Face," reporting on the viral popularity of the emoji.

On January 10th, 2021, Redditor^[9] LadyManderly posted a two-panel meme based on @ayyy_vuh's tweet that gained over 7,300 upvotes and was widely circulated in the following years (shown below, left). On January 19th, 2021, iFunny^[10] user The_Weeb_Firefighter posted a Monogatari version of the meme that gained over 52,000 smiles in two years and also received viral spread (shown below, right).

The emoji has been used to convey emotions of shyness, pleading, manipulation, simping, horniness and as a codeword for "bottom," among other things. On November 22nd, 2021, Twitter^[11] user @Alriynin made a tweet about the various meanings of the emoji that gained over 31,200 retweets and 181,300 likes in eight months (shown below).

Related Memes

👉👈 Two Fingers Touching

👉👈 Two Fingers Touching are two index finger emojis pointing towards one another which typically signify shyness or hesitation when asking a question. Although the set of emojis have been used since they were available for iPhone in 2011, the action of performing the finger touch or adding it to text in memes became popular in March 2020 on Twitter and TikTok.

Various Examples

Search Interest

External References