This emoji (), which may or may not appear correctly on your device,* is called FACE WITH BAGS UNDER EYES. It’s a relative newcomer, gaining the Unicode stamp of approval only in 2024,1 and has been rolling out gradually across computers, smartphones and applications since then. Thanks to the vagaries of software update schedules, this means it is entirely possible that your current device is showing you a “missing character” symbol (‘▯’ or similar) rather than a tired-looking emoji face. Only by observing an emoji can we discover its true state.
That emoji can have this kind of quantum unknowability about them is interesting enough in itself, and we’ll come back to that later, but first I want to talk about another of FACE WITH BAGS UNDER EYES’ notable qualities: namely, its popularity. Or perhaps its unpopularity. It’s hard to tell. We’re still in Schrödinger territory.
Earlier this year, under its “World Emoji Awards” banner, Emojipedia named FACE WITH BAGS UNDER EYES as the most popular new emoji of 2025.2 But what exactly does “popular” mean?
Once upon a time, there was little argument. A site called emojitracker.com used a consider amount of technical wizardry3,4 to present a live leaderboard of all emoji used on Twitter, its scores ticking upwards every time an emoji was tweeted. It was a glorious, glittering thing: Twitter was the buzziest social network out there, and its firehose of new tweets made it the perfect place to track emoji usage. According to emojitracker’s maker, Matthew Rothenberg, by 2015 the Unicode Consortium itself was using his site to gauge the likely popularity of proposed emoji.4 And speaking personally, for me emojitracker was the very embodiment of the concept of emoji popularity; there were few other ways to gain such a direct insight into how emoji were being used in practice.
Then, in 2023, emojitracker stopped working.
Admittedly, the site was already lagging behind the times. Rothenberg had not updated emojitracker’s list of supported emoji for some years, so that many newer emoji never made it onto the emojitracker leaderboard.5 Then, early in 2023, a post-acquisition Twitter shut off the data feeds that made emojitracker possible, and emojitracker’s downfall was complete.6,7 Diminished though it was, it was still a shock for the foremost emoji popularity meter to be brought down so suddenly.
As of July 2025, however, emojitracker is back. But its notion of popularity has shifted, and not in a small way. Now part of the Emojipedia empire, the new emojitracker measures the number of times that Emojipedia’s users have copied any given emoji for use elsewhere6,8 — and this is the race which FACE WITH BAGS UNDER EYES won in order to be named the most popular emoji of 2025.
It isn’t entirely clear how emojitracker’s new algorithm will stack up to the older one. But a moment’s thought suggests it will favour both newer emoji (with which users are not yet familiar) and also older but less common emoji (with which they were never familiar). The reported popularity of the more mundane emoji in day-to-day use may suffer in comparison.
This is not necessarily bad. I’m glad that emojitracker works again! But it does highlight something about emoji that I think is easy to forget: for all that one might want to think about emoji in an objective way (what does this emoji mean? How is it used? How popular is it?), it is increasingly difficult to do so. Popularity differs depending on how one measures it, if it is even possible to measure it at all. Appearance differs depending on which device you are using, as FACE WITH BAGS UNDER EYES demonstrates. And as we’ve seen throughout this series, an emoji’s meaning can change depending on where you live, how old you are, your profession, or even your political leanings.
More and more, in other words, emoji are becoming like other languages and scripts — shifting and changing in the hands of their users, and in the hands of those who control their means of distribution. What is the most popular emoji? I’m not sure anyone can tell you. What does it mean? Ditto. These are the kinds of questions that give you bags under your eyes.
- 1.
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Emojipedia. “Face With Bags Under Eyes Emoji”. Accessed November 26, 2025.
- 2.
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Broni, Keith. “The Most Popular New Emoji of 2025 Is. ”. Emojipedia (blog).
- 3.
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Rothenberg, Matthew. “How I Built Emojitracker”. Medium (blog).
- 4.
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Rothenberg, Matthew. “How I Kept Building Emojitracker”. Medium (blog).
- 5.
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Burge, Jeremy. “Emojipedia 🧡 Emojitracker”. Emojipedia (blog).
- 6.
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Broni, Keith. “Emojitracker Is Back”. Emojipedia (blog).
- 7.
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Stokel-Walker, Chris. “TechScape: Why Twitter ending free access to its APIs should be a ‘wake-up call’”. The Guardian, sec. Technology.
- 8.
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“Emojitracker: Realtime Emoji Use”. Accessed November 28, 2025.
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- If you can’t see it but would like to, take a look at Emojipedia’s page. ↢