World Emoji Day

Lifetime Achievement Award: The 🫠 Melting Face Emoji

Today, as part of our annual World Emoji Awards ahead of World Emoji Day (July 17), we're proud to announce that the 🫠 Melting Face emoji is the youngest-ever winner of our coveted Lifetime Achievement Award. But that begs the question - why this emoji, and what exactly does it mean?

Keith Broni, David Doochin

Jul 14, 2025 • 5 min read

Well, earlier this year, David Doochin featured the 🫠 Melting Face in our Emoji Of The Week series - you can check out the TikTok video below, or continue to read the transcript of the video:

Emoji Of The Week: the 🫠 Melting Face

Whether you’re ready for a seriously sizzling Hot Girl Summer or trying not to melt under the pressure of it all, one emoji is un-solidifying in solidarity.

The Emojipedia Emoji of the Week is… the 🫠 Melting Face emoji.

@emojipediaofficial Because these days it feels like the floor is always lava... 🫠🌋🌡️🍦🥵🙃 #emojioftheweek #emojis #popculture #internet #internetculture #emojipedia #summer ♬ Summer Hits - Mr Sami

This ooey-gooey glyph gives classic smiley, but don’t be fooled—it’s practically oozing semiotic nuance.

Few emojis have made as many waves—or puddles?—as the 🫠 Melting Face has since its debut.

"Emojis are designed to convey emotions like happy or sad or penis." pic.twitter.com/An2bYyZGZm
— jennifer daniel (@jenniferdaniel) October 1, 2021

With features across mainstream media, it’s something of a liquefied legend, with shoutouts on the New York Times front page, on late-night talk shows, and in British GQ, where one writer said in 2022 that the “melting face emoji is everywhere and all of us.”

It’s an emoji that hasn’t been around that long, since it was only released by Unicode in September 2021, alongside other new-to-the-scene fan favorites like the 🫡 Saluting Face, the 🫥 Dotted Line Face, and 🥹 Face Holding Back Tears.

But it arrived at a precise moment when pandemic fatigue had become a global mood, which helped the emoji quickly become, according to the Times, a stand-in for our collective sense of burnout, dread, and digital-era malaise.

🥵 TURNING UP THE HEAT

So, how did this fondue-forward little smiley come to be a melting pot of our lived experiences?

Let’s start with the obvious literal interpretation: melting implies heat, and with the height of summer—Hot Girl or otherwise—fast approaching, the 🫠 Melting Face is well poised to be our seasonally appropriate spokesperson.

Ice cream cones. Butter on warm toast. The polar ice caps on a planet in climate crisis. The world is dripping with meltable moments for our new molten mascot.

The emoji also works as a pop culture ambassador—think Nelly’s “Hot in Herre,” or Frosty the Snowman, or the 2005 Disney movie Sky High, where sidekick Ethan Banks shapeshifts into a puddle.

L. Frank Baum fans also know that melting is no minor motif in the world of Oz, since it’s how the Wicked Witch of the West meets her demise in an iconic scene in cinematic history.

Stans of Wicked the musical will also clock the foreshadowing in “The Wizard and I,” when Elphaba sings she’d be so happy she “could melt”—but no spoilers, of course.

😭 AN EMOTIONAL MELTDOWN EMOJI AMIGO

All of this leads us into melting as a metaphor: for composure, unraveling, or emotional entropy.

Those whose internet language is dripping with sarcasm, irony, and snark would probably argue that that’s what the 🫠 Melting Face exists for in the first place.

Whether you’re overwhelmed, overextended, or simply over trying to keep it together, the 🫠 Melting Face is the perfect pictographic companion for the full spectrum of emotional discomfort—from awkwardness to shame to existential dread.

Accidentally liking your crush’s Instagram post from 2014. Saying, “You, too!” when the waiter says, “Enjoy your meal.” Looking at your full calendar for the day ahead, running on 1 hour of sleep. Flushing at a friend’s house and it… won’t… go… down. The list of appropriate use cases goes on. All aboard the hot mess express.

It leans into the same reality-subverting irony as the 🙃 Upside-Down Face. It’s the emoji counterpart to the meme of that dog in the fiery room saying, “This is fine.” Or that Key & Peele sweating sketch. (You know the one.) Or a Dalí painting in digital form—a sort of “this can’t be happening” surrealism.

So yes, maybe the 🫠 Melting Face is all of us.

Because, in the words of Erik Carter, the graphic designer involved in proposing the emoji: “Sometimes it does feel as though the best we can do is smile as we melt away.”

The Lifetime Achievement Award

As mentioned in our introduction, the 🫠 Melting Face emoji is the youngest emoji to be named as the recipient of our Lifetime Achievement Award.

The other recipients of this award thus far have been as follows:

In addition to the 🫠 Melting Face's accolades listed above, the emoji has also been the recipient of the following other World Emoji Awards:

Emojipedia's @KeithBroni shared the winning news over on @FoxWeather ✨

🫠 Melting Face is your #Most2022Emoji! pic.twitter.com/9E7ywd72OZ
— World Emoji Awards 🗳🌍🏆 (@EmojiAwards) July 17, 2022

In fact, the 🫠 Melting Face has been so dominant in our Most 202x Awards that we officially retired it from this year's bracket while awarding it the Lifetime Achievement Award.

Our Most 2025 Emoji will be announced on World Emoji Day (Thursday, July 17), with the current bracket looking as follows:

What single emoji best represents the year so far?

Help us crown the 🗓️ Most 2025 Emoji right here on X. We'll all be voting in the run up to #WorldEmojiDay!

Let's do this! pic.twitter.com/om2Aw8I2it
— World Emoji Awards 🗳🌍🏆 (@EmojiAwards) July 14, 2025

Make sure to go to X or Instagram to vote for the Most 2025 emoji!

Also, already have an emoji in mind for our 2026 Lifetime Achievement Award? Please send your suggestions to us via X, Bluesky, Threads, Instagram, or Mastodon.

And of course, make sure to share your #WorldEmojiDay celebrations across all social media platforms of your choice! 📅