The above character encoding declaration tells the web browser to use UTF-8 as the character encoding. You can also just write the character reference out in full and then you won't need to worry about encoding, but seeing a string of hexadecimal numbers isn't always as obvious as seeing the emoji itself. "🤷🏿‍ ♀️" is a lot harder to read than just seeing "🤷🏿‍♀️" in your code.

While the shrug emoji doesn't have a named character entity, you can use the hex or dec character references which we've listed in the table. Both the hexadecimal or decimal can be used directly in your html code to represent a shrugging emoji. If for some reason you are not serving your CSS files in UTF-8, you can substitute the emoji with a string of six hexideicmal digits behind a backslash. The specific spec for CSS is here. We've listed out the various genders and skin tone variations in the table for easy lookup.

Combine unicode characters to produce gender and skin tone variations

You'll notice that the gender and skin tone variations are made up of a sequence of Unicode characters. Gender specific shrugging emojis are displayed when the generic shrug emoji (U+1F937 🤷) is combined with a zero width joiner (U+200D) and the female symbol (U+2640 ♀️) for instance. You can read more about gender zero width joiner (ZWJ) sequences here. If the system display is not capable of displaying genered emojis, it will fall back and display the individual emojis next to each other as such 🤷 ♀️. They are not guaranteed to be supported on every platform.

In the example above, a variation selector VS16 (U+FE0F) is also included. This variation selector indictates to a system that the emoji version should be presented instead of the text version. Using VS-15 (U+FE0E) will force the display to be the text version. Below is a table with a few examples as the graphical male and female symbols are not as obviously different as their text counterparts.

The skin tone modifier works in a smilar fashion, just without the ZWJ. Skin tone modifiers, if present, must be included after the emoji but before the ZWJ.

Individual skin tone shades can also be copy and pasted:

• 🏿 Dark
• 🏾 Medium Dark
• 🏽 Medium
• 🏻 Light