Rose emoji
The rose 🌹 is romance; the wilted rose 🥀 is heartbreak, dark humour and a meme in its own right. Copy both here.
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The rose and the wilted rose
🌹 (rose) is the romance flower: Valentine’s Day, anniversaries, “thinking of you”, the single stem between lovers. It also works as elegance and beauty in captions, and in some political contexts as the symbol of social-democratic and socialist parties. 🥀 (wilted flower, Emoji 3.0) is the opposite: a drooping stem, meaning heartbreak, grief, a dead relationship, neglect, and, in memes, a dramatic “I am withering away”.
The wilted rose has had a second life as a meme: it appears next to sad captions, quotes about lost love and jokes about being forgotten, and it is sometimes used ironically for minor disappointments (“they were out of oat milk 🥀”). For the rest of the flowers, see the flower emoji guide.
Compare the options
| Emoji | Name | Use it for | Watch out for |
|---|---|---|---|
| roseU+1F339 | Romance, beauty, elegance | Strongly romantic on its own | |
| wilted flowerU+1F940 | Heartbreak, grief, dramatic sadness, irony | Reads as bleak in a serious context | |
| bouquetU+1F490 | A bouquet: thanks, congratulations | Not romantic | |
| tulip / cherry blossomU+1F337 · U+1F338 | Fresh, soft, spring | Lighter | |
| broken heartU+1F494 | Heartbreak as a heart | See the broken heart guide |
Sending roses
- Partner: 🌹 alone says a lot; 🌹❤️ says more.
- Valentine’s: 🌹🍫💌
- A breakup post: 🥀 or 🥀💔
- Ironic sadness: “monday 🥀”
- Memorials: 🌹 or 🥀 with 🕊️ — see the dove emoji guide
A note on colour: the emoji rose is red on every platform, so 🌹 cannot stand in for a yellow (friendship) or white (sympathy) rose. For those, add words or use 💐 and 🤍.
Chat examples
Real messages with 🌹, and a reply that fits.
happy Valentine’s 🌹
🥰
roses from the garden 🌹🌹
beautiful
🥀 rough week
here if you need me
Questions people ask
What does 🥀 mean?
A wilted flower: heartbreak, grief or something that has faded. Online it is also used ironically for small disappointments.
Is 🌹 always romantic?
Mostly. Between friends it can mean “you’re lovely”, and in captions it is elegance, but a single rose to one person reads as romantic.
Is there a dead rose emoji?
🥀 is the closest — its Unicode name is wilted flower, but it is drawn as a drooping rose on most platforms.
About this guide
Written and maintained by the Emoji Directory editorial team, without ads or sponsorship. Meanings describe how the emoji is commonly used in public posts and messages, not an official definition. Names, code points, versions, keywords and translations come from the Unicode Emoji 18.0 and CLDR data; shortcodes from the gemoji project. Last reviewed . Spotted a mistake or a new usage? Tell us, or read how the directory is made.
