The microbe emoji is your spiky, lime-green stand-in for germs, ickiness, and anything that feels a little… contaminated (physically or vibes-wise). People drop it when they’re feeling under the weather, calling out a sketchy surface (“public doorknob energy”), or joking about toxic drama spreading faster than a meme. In texts and tweets, it swings from literal (cold season, lab talk) to ironic (“my toxic trait is…”) to playful (“your laugh is infectious,” wink). It also tags along in posts about fermented foods, sourdough starters, kombucha SCOBYs, and all things microscopic-but-mighty.
On Apple/iOS, the microbe looks like a soft, 3D-shaded, neon-lime amoeba with darker green splotches and a fringe of tiny hair-like cilia/flagella poking out all around. No face, no drama—just a blobby organism with a slightly tilted perspective that screams “science lab meets cartoon slime.” The mottled spots and fuzzy spike outline are the dead giveaways; it reads instantly as a germy little unit.
Culturally, it had a huge moment during 2020’s wave of hand-washing memes and sanitizer selfies, often paired with the mask, soap, and petri dish emojis. It’s great for sarcasm (“my phone screen after a day out” + microbe), dramatic flair (“this group chat is contagious”), or even oddly flirty puns (“your charm? highly infectious”). Science nerds use it earnestly alongside microscope chats and PCR jokes, while internet goblins deploy it for cringe, chaos, and “ew, don’t touch that” alerts. Whether you’re announcing a sick day or calling out biohazard vibes, this green blob gets the point across—no lab coat required.
| Twitter Emoji Popularity (Rank) | 945 of 2393 |
| Apple/iOS Picture |  |
| Google Android Picture | Image not available |
| Google Hangouts Picture | Image not available |
| Twitter.com Picture | Image not available |
| LG Emoji Picture | Image not available |
| Samsung Emoji Picture | Image not available |
| Phantom Open Emoji Picture | Not created yet |
| ASCII Conversion | |
| "Short Code" Name | |
| Keywords |
| Emoji Code Version | iOS 12 - Current |
|---|---|
| UTF-8 Unicode Character(s) | 🦠 |
| UTF-8 Character Count | 1 |
| Character(s) In Input | |
| AppleColorEmoji Font (available in OSX/iOS) | 🦠 |
| Decimal HTML Entity | 🦠 |
| Hexadecimal HTML Entity | 🦠 |
| Hex Code Point(s) | 1f9a0 |
| Formal Unicode Notation | U+1F9A0 |
| Decimal Code Point(s) | 129440 | UTF-8 Hex (C Syntax) | 0xF0 0x9F 0xA6 0xA0 |
| UTF-8 Hex Bytes | F0 9F A6 A0 |
| UTF-8 Octal Bytes | 360 237 246 240 |
| UTF-16 Hex (C Syntax) | 0xD83E 0xDDA0 |
| UTF-16 Hex | d83edda0 |
| UTF-16 Dec | 55358 56736 |
| UTF-32 Hex (C Syntax) | 0x0001F9A0 |
| UTF-32 Hex | 01F9A0 |
| UTF-32 Dec | 129440 |
| Python Src | u"\U0001F9A0" |
| PHP Src | "\xf0\x9f\xa6\xa0" |
| C/C++/Java Src | "\uD83E\uDDA0" |
