🤳 Selfie emoji

The Selfie emoji 🤳 was approved in 2016 under Unicode 9.0.

The first ever selfie—in the general sense of a photograph of one’s self—is credited to photographic pioneer Robert Cornelius in 1839, when he set up the camera and had time to pose in front of it, place the lens cap back on, and produce a daguerreotype of himself.

The word selfie is first reported in an online forum back in 2002, coined by an Australian referring to a messy self portrait. When the Sony Ericsson Z1010 mobile phone was released in 2003, it introduced the first front-facing camera, which quickly became a popular feature on cell phones.  The term selfie began climbing in popularity in 2010 and 2011, and in 2012, Time magazine called it one of the year’s Top Ten “buzzwords.”