Random Emoji Generator

Pick your categories and draw. Before anything is offered to you it is drawn onto a hidden canvas and checked, so nothing in the results is a box, a pair of letters, or a sequence your font pulls apart.

Why a random emoji so often arrives as an empty box

Emoji artwork is not part of the web page. It ships with the operating system, in a font that is updated when the device is updated. A phone left on an old release simply has no picture for anything added since, and the browser falls back to a hollow rectangle — the tofu box.

So this page checks first. At load, every candidate is painted onto a small offscreen canvas in a bright fill colour, and three things are measured: whether any pixels were inked at all, whether any of those pixels came out in a colour other than the fill (which a real emoji glyph always does and a fallback box never does), and whether the glyph is about the width of one emoji rather than two or three side by side.

That last test is what catches multi-part sequences. Anything failing is dropped from the pool and the counter tells you how many went. It is a heuristic and it has one known false alarm: a system using a black-and-white emoji font would fail the colour test on everything. If more than nine in ten candidates fail, the tool assumes the check itself is wrong, switches it off and says so — and you can untick the box at any time.

The same emoji is a different picture everywhere

Unicode standardises two things about an emoji: its code point and its name. It has never standardised the artwork. Apple, Google, Microsoft, Samsung and the open-source Twemoji set each draw their own, which is why a face that reads as cheerful on one phone reads as smug on another.

The clearest case is U+1F52B, whose formal Unicode name is still PISTOL. Apple redrew it as a bright green water pistol in 2016, and the other major vendors followed over the next two years, so the same character now delivers a toy everywhere. Nothing in the text changed. Only the pictures did.

Country flags are the sharpest divide. A flag is not one character but a pair of regional indicator symbols, U+1F1E6 to U+1F1FF, one per letter of the ISO 3166-1 country code. Windows has for years shipped no flag artwork, so browsers on Windows commonly show the two letters instead. The render check catches exactly this.

Skin tones and multi-part sequences, handled properly

The five skin-tone modifiers, U+1F3FB to U+1F3FF, are separate characters placed immediately after the emoji they colour. They apply only to emoji carrying Unicode's Emoji_Modifier_Base property — essentially people and body parts. Append one to a pizza and you have not tinted anything; you have an invalid sequence that most systems draw as a pizza followed by a coloured square.

This tool therefore tags every entry that accepts a modifier and applies your chosen tone only to those. The pool line tells you how many of the emoji currently in play are affected. Everything else is left exactly as it is.

Multi-part sequences work differently again: two or more emoji joined by U+200D, the zero width joiner, which asks the font for one combined picture. Unicode publishes a recommended list of these; sequences off that list are legal text but almost nothing draws them as a single glyph. Tones are not applied to sequences here, because placing a modifier inside one is a per-sequence question rather than a general rule.

What the code points under each result are for

Every result shows its code points, because that is the only unambiguous way to identify an emoji. Two that look identical on your screen can be different characters, and one that looks broken usually has a code point that explains why.

You will see U+FE0F appear in several sequences. That is variation selector-16, which requests the colourful emoji form of a character that would otherwise be drawn as monochrome text. Strip it out when pasting into a system that does not expect it and the same character can quietly turn into a black-and-white symbol.

Frequently asked questions

Why do some emoji show up as an empty box?

The font has no glyph for that code point, almost always because the device predates the emoji. Updating the operating system is the only real fix; nothing a web page does can install artwork. What this page can do is notice and stop offering you those characters, which is why its available count is often lower than its total count.

Do skin tone modifiers work on every emoji?

No, only on the ones Unicode marks as modifier bases. The five tones are drawn from the Fitzpatrick scale, with the two palest types combined into a single modifier, so five characters cover six types. They are deliberately coarse: they were designed to offer a reasonable choice rather than to describe anyone precisely.

Will the emoji I copy look the same to the person I send it to?

It will be the same character, and usually a different picture. What lands in your clipboard is plain text, so it carries correctly through any system that handles Unicode; the appearance is decided by the font at the other end. If the receiving device is older than the emoji, they will see the box you were spared.

Is anything I do on this page sent anywhere?

No. The emoji set is embedded in the page, the rendering test runs on a canvas in your own browser, and drawing or copying makes no network request at all. The site carries no advertising yet; once it does, the ad slot will load third-party resources separately — that will be the one thing on the page that talks to anyone, and it never receives your draws or your filters.

Known limits

This is a curated set of 621 emoji, not all of Unicode: it leaves out most gendered and professional variants, the component characters, and every sequence whose support is too patchy to be worth offering. Names are the common short labels, not the formal uppercase Unicode character names, and they are English only. Nothing is saved between visits — reload and the settings return to their defaults.