Blushing Kaomoji
Thirty blushing faces, ready to copy. A kaomoji cannot colour anything in, so the blush is drawn as hatching — and which slash you use changes how hot it reads.
Tap any tile to copy it. Nothing is sent anywhere — the copy happens in your browser.
The blush sits beside the face, not on it
A Western emoticon would redden the cheeks. A kaomoji has no colour available, so it draws hatching instead — short parallel strokes in the place a comic artist would put blush lines. In (*ﾉωﾉ) the mark is an asterisk. In (//∇//) a pair of slashes stands in for each entire eye region. In (〃ω〃) a single character does both cheeks.
Three slashes, three widths
| Character | Code point | Name | Width |
|---|---|---|---|
| / | U+002F | SOLIDUS | Narrow |
| ⁄ | U+2044 | FRACTION SLASH | Neutral |
| ／ | U+FF0F | FULLWIDTH SOLIDUS | Fullwidth |
They look the same and behave differently. (///ω///) built from ASCII slashes is tight and reads as a fast scribble. (＞//////＜) needs six of them to fill the space a face made of full-width characters occupies. U+2044 FRACTION SLASH is intended for building fractions, and a renderer that implements that behaviour will reshape digits sitting either side of it, which makes it the least predictable of the three. The spaces in (⁄ ⁄•⁄ω⁄•⁄ ⁄) keep digits and other characters clear of it.
〃 is a ditto mark
〃 is U+3003 DITTO MARK, a full-width punctuation mark whose real job is to say same as the line above in a list. Two short strokes at cheek height is exactly what a blush needs, which is why it sits in that slot so well. ＃ U+FF03 FULLWIDTH NUMBER SIGN gives the crosshatched version — denser, and read as hotter.
Hands that hide the face
The other half of embarrassment is covering up. ﾉ U+FF89 HALFWIDTH KATAKANA LETTER NO and ＼ U+FF3C FULLWIDTH REVERSE SOLIDUS make a pair of hands, and because one is half-width and the other full-width they sit at different distances from the face. (｡ﾉω＼｡) is asymmetric on purpose: one hand is already up, the other is still on its way.
Why (*ﾉωﾉ) reads warmer than (//∇//)
The mouth decides it. ω U+03C9 GREEK SMALL LETTER OMEGA is two soft lobes, read as a small closed mouth. ∇ U+2207 NABLA is a hard downward triangle borrowed from vector calculus, and reads as open and loud. Same blush, different temperature: one is flustered quietly, the other is flustered out loud.
๑ U+0E51 THAI DIGIT ONE is the third option. It is a small spiral placed at the outer edge of the face — (๑´ω`๑) — and reads as a rounded cheek rather than a stroke of colour, which suits a cute face better than an embarrassed one.
Where it breaks
A blush made of ASCII slashes is invisible in a proportional font that renders / very narrow, and pasted into source in a language where // opens a comment it takes the rest of the line with it. The full-width forms survive both. The other hazard is Markdown emphasis, and it is narrower than it looks. Emphasis is keyed on one asterisk that can open a span and one that can close it, so the faces at risk are the symmetrical ones carrying a cheek mark pressed against each bracket: put (*≧∀≦*) or (*ﾟ▽ﾟ*) through a CommonMark renderer and both asterisks are consumed, leaving the middle of the face italicised and the blush gone. (*ﾉωﾉ) comes through untouched, because its single asterisk has nothing to pair with, and so does (๑*∀*๑), whose asterisks each have a digit on one side rather than a bracket. If the field you are pasting into runs Markdown, escape each asterisk as \* or wrap the whole face in backticks.
Blushing faces overlap heavily with flower kaomoji, where an ornament does similar work at the same position, and the full character inventory is on the kaomoji hub. Swap the asterisk for ♡ and you have (♡ﾉωﾉ), which belongs with the heart kaomoji; the same faces labelled in Japanese are on the Japanese tereru page.