🫱 rightwards hand Emoji — Meaning, Copy & Paste

What Does the rightwards hand Emoji 🫱 Mean?

An open hand extended to the right with the palm facing up — 🫱 is one of the directional hand emojis introduced in 2021, designed specifically to convey hands reaching or offering toward another person. Combined with 🫲 (leftwards hand), the pair forms a complete handshake or hand-passing gesture, finally giving the emoji keyboard a clean way to depict that interaction.

In texting, 🫱 reads as offering, passing, or reaching toward someone. "Here's your coffee 🫱" — handing something over. "Take my hand 🫱" — offering support. "Passing this question over to you 🫱" — turning the floor. The directional nature gives it specific communicative power that omnidirectional hand emojis don't have.

The handshake combination is what made these emojis so notable on arrival. Pair 🫱 with 🫲 (sometimes with a skin tone or sex-marker between them, depending on platform) and you've got a clear handshake. Before 2021, the standard 🤝 was the only handshake option, but the new directional hands allowed for mixed-skin-tone handshakes — a culturally important upgrade that the older single-color emoji couldn't provide.

It also works for narration of physical interactions. "He 🫱 me the keys" — gestural storytelling. "She came up 🫱 a hello" — narrating a hand-offer moment. The emoji functions almost grammatically in some sentences, indicating direction of movement.

Skin tone modifiers are supported, with six options available. This was a deliberate design choice — the directional hands were created in part to enable representational diversity in interactions.

The usage is still growing as adoption spreads. Because 🫱 is newer, some users don't have it on their default keyboards yet, and older devices may not render it at all. Adoption has been steady but it's not yet a top-tier popular emoji.

On TikTok and Twitter/X, 🫱 shows up in handshake combos, hand-offering gestures, and inclusive-representation captions. It pairs with 🫲 frequently to form complete handshakes.

Apple renders 🫱 as an open right hand extended to the right, palm up. Google's version is similar with slightly different hand positioning. Samsung's is consistent. The directional intent is preserved across platforms.

Unicode 14.0 added 🫱 in 2021, alongside the leftwards hand and other directional hand emojis. The set was designed specifically to enable inclusive handshake combinations.

Reach for 🫱 for offering gestures, hand-passing, handshake combinations (with 🫲), inclusive-representation content, and any moment when a rightward-reaching hand fits better than an omnidirectional one.