You know the feeling. Your laptop freezes during a final save, or you just realized you’ve been on hold with the IRS for seventy-four minutes. You open your keyboard, looking for that one specific image to vent your absolute soul-crushing frustration. You want the emoji pulling out hair. You scan the faces. You see the "Exploding Head," the "Face with Symbols on Mouth," and maybe even the "Weary Face." But that specific, frantic animation of hands grasping at a scalp? It isn’t there.
It’s a digital ghost.
People swear they’ve seen it. They search for it on Google thousands of times a month, convinced it exists in the standard Unicode set. It doesn’t. This is a classic case of the "Mandela Effect" for the smartphone generation, where our collective memory of frustration has projected a non-existent character onto our keyboards. Honestly, it’s kinda fascinating how we’ve collectively hallucinated a piece of software that hasn’t actually been coded into the official standard yet.
The Unicode Mystery: Why the Emoji Pulling Out Hair Doesn't Exist
Let’s get technical for a second, but not too boring. The Unicode Consortium is the group that decides which emojis make it onto your phone. They meet every year to vet proposals. For a character to become a "real" emoji, it has to pass through a rigorous process involving proof of "frequent use" and "distinctiveness."
As of Unicode 16.0, there is no single character designated as "Face Pulling Out Hair."
Why? Because Unicode usually prefers to represent emotions through facial expressions rather than specific physical actions unless those actions are culturally iconic. We have "Person Gesturing No" and "Person Raising Hand," but "Person Tearing Their Hair Out" hasn't made the cut. Most people end up settling for the Person Frowning or the Fearful Face, but they don't carry the same weight. They don't capture that specific, manic energy of being at your wit's end.
The Bitmoji and Discord Factor
So where did this memory come from? If it’s not on the iPhone or Android keyboard, why do we all think it is? Basically, we’re seeing "fringe" platforms filling the gap.
If you use Bitmoji, you’ve definitely seen your avatar ripping their hair out. Discord has custom emotes that server owners upload, and "hyper-stress" or "blob-stress" emojis—which often involve hair-pulling—are incredibly popular there. Slack also has "party-parrot" variations that do similar things. Because we spend so much time in these third-party apps, our brains stop distinguishing between the "official" Unicode emojis and the custom stickers we use elsewhere.
You’ve probably seen a GIF of a cartoon character doing it and your brain just filed it under "emoji."
Why We Actually Need This Specific Symbol
Psychologically, the emoji pulling out hair represents something the current set doesn't: acute stress versus chronic stress.
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The current "Anxious Face with Sweat" ($\text{U+1F630}$) looks worried. The "Pouting Face" ($\text{U+1F641}$) looks sad. But pulling out hair is an act of desperation. It’s "trichotillomania" as a metaphor for a bad day. In a world where digital communication is our primary way of expressing internal states, the lack of a "total meltdown" icon feels like a linguistic gap. We are forced to use combinations like the "🤯" (Exploding Head) plus the "😫" (Tired Face) to approximate a feeling that a single hair-pulling icon would solve instantly.
It’s about the intensity.
Sometimes a "Grimacing Face" just doesn't communicate that your toddler just wiped jam on the white velvet sofa. You need the hair pull. You need the visual of literal self-destruction.
The Evolution of Frustration Emojis
We've seen the evolution of "angry" and "stressed" icons over the last decade.
- 2010: The basics arrive. "Angry Face" and "Pouting Face." Very simple.
- 2015: We get more nuance. "Upside-Down Face" becomes the universal symbol for "I am laughing but actually dying inside."
- 2017: "Exploding Head" arrives. This was a game changer. It finally gave us a way to say our brains were fried.
- 2020-2025: More specific stress markers like "Face in Clouds" or "Face with Peeking Eye" appear.
Yet, despite these additions, the emoji pulling out hair remains the "Holy Grail" of frustrated digital shorthand. It is the missing link in the evolution of the "I can't even" vocabulary.
How to "Fake" the Hair Pulling Emoji Right Now
Since Google and Apple haven't given us the official one yet, you have to get creative. There are a few workarounds that the internet has adopted to signal this specific brand of chaos.
The Kaomoji Method
Before emojis, we had Japanese emoticons. These are still great because they use standard text characters to create complex shapes. The "hair pull" version usually looks something like this:
(ノಥ益ಥ)ノ 彡┻━┻
Wait, that’s a table flip. The hair pull is more like:
(ง ͠° ͟ل͜ ͡°)ง ...no, that's a fight.
Actually, the best one is: (＃ﾟДﾟ)つ- (where the hyphen represents the hair being yanked). It’s not perfect, but it works in a pinch.
The Sticker Workaround
If you are on WhatsApp or iMessage, use the sticker search function. Searching for "stress" or "pulling hair" will pull up dozens of animated stickers that aren't technically emojis but function exactly the same way in a chat thread. This is why the confusion persists—you’ve seen your friend send a sticker of a cat pulling its hair out, and you remember it as an emoji.
The "Combination Play"
Professional texters use a sequence. It’s usually:
🏃♂️💨 😱 💇♂️
(The "Running Man," "Screaming Face," and "Person Getting Haircut.")
It’s a bit of a reach. But when you’re desperate to show you’re losing it, you do what you have to do.
Will We Ever Get a Real One?
The Unicode Consortium is surprisingly conservative. They don't just add things because they're "funny." They look for longevity. They ask if people will still be using the emoji pulling out hair in thirty years.
Given that human frustration is an eternal constant, the answer is probably yes. There have been several informal proposals floating around in emoji design circles. Designers like Jennifer Daniel, who has been a major voice in emoji development, often discuss how to represent more "internal" states. The challenge with "pulling out hair" is making it legible at 16x16 pixels. If the hands are too small, it just looks like the person is holding their ears. If the hair doesn't "pop" off the head, it just looks like they're wearing a hat.
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Design is hard.
But there is hope. Every year, a new batch of emojis is released. We just got a "Shaking Face," which is perfect for "I'm literally vibrating with rage." The natural next step is the physical manifestation of that vibration—the hair pull.
Actionable Steps for the Truly Frustrated
If you are tired of searching your keyboard for a ghost, here is what you can actually do to fill that void in your digital life:
- Create a Keyboard Shortcut: On iPhone or Android, go to Settings > Keyboard > Text Replacement. Set a shortcut like "ppl" (pulling) to automatically paste a Kaomoji like
(╯°□°)╯or a specific GIF link. - Use GIPHY Integration: Most social keyboards (like Gboard) have a built-in GIF search. Instead of looking for an emoji, tap the GIF icon and type "pulling hair." The "Inside Out" Joy/Sadness/Anger clips are usually the top results and communicate the feeling better than a static icon anyway.
- Check the Emojipedia "Requests" List: If you’re really passionate, you can actually see what’s being proposed. While individual users can't easily "vote," keeping an eye on Emojipedia’s blog will tell you if the "Hair Pull" has finally made it into the draft candidates for the next Unicode release.
- Lean Into the "Exploding Head": For now, 🤯 is the industry standard for "my brain is melting." It’s the closest thing we have to a formal acknowledgment of total mental collapse.
Stop scrolling through the "Smileys & Emotion" section expecting to find it. It's not there. You aren't crazy—you’ve just seen too many stickers and GIFs that look like emojis. Until the Unicode Consortium realizes that we are all collectively losing our minds and need a way to show it, we’ll have to stick to the old-fashioned way: typing "AAAAAAGH" in all caps and hoping for the best.