Emoji dictionary

✨ Sparkles emoji

[spahr-kuh lz ih-moh-jee]

What does ✨ Sparkles emoji mean?

All that ✨ is not gold. It’s also the versatile sparkles emoji, ✨.

This emoji can stand for actual stars in the sky, show excitement and admiration, express love and congratulations, or suggest forms of magic and cleanliness. It can also represent other, more literal sparkling things, such as jewelry, glitter, and fireworks. Sexters even occasionally use it to mean “orgasm.”

Related words: 

Where does ✨ Sparkles emoji come from?

Digital stars and sparkles have been around since the early days of emoticons as they can easily be represented by asterisks, or *.  They can even be added to smiley faces to indicate being starstruck or in love, such as (*_*).

These crude asterisks were slowly replaced by all manner of emoji glitter and gold, including white medium star ⭐, glowing star 🌟, shooting star 🌠, and our classy cluster of three stars known as the sparkles emoji ✨, which debuted under Unicode 6.0 in 2010. It sometimes goes by the name stars emoji.

Across platforms, the sparkles emoji always appears as three gold or yellow stars. The sparkles emoji on iPhones and Androids are mirror images of one another: a large star with two little ones to one side. Samsung features sparklier-looking sparkles on a blue background while Microsoft adds some pink and blue to the mix, as shown in the screenshots from Emojipedia below:

On the messaging app Snap, the sparkles emoji displays next to users you are in a group chat with.

Examples of ✨ Sparkles emoji

✨serving this glow all summer✨
@yaz_perez, Instagram, July, 2018
i was absolutely star struck❤💜💚😁✨
@aeonianlife, July, 2018
✨ Happy 4th of July America ❤Be safe & have all the fun xx
@samsmithword, July, 2018
SEE MORE EXAMPLES

Who uses ✨ Sparkles emoji?

In texts and on social media, the sparkles emoji is used to highlight posts about feeling excited and giddy with love, perhaps as if “seeing stars” or feeling all tingly inside.

Among astronomy enthusiasts, the sparkles emoji can represent those twinkle, twinkle, little stars and the cosmos more generally.

People who are proud of accomplishments sprinkle in some sparkles emoji when they are or someone is feeling like a star.

The sparkles emoji can also express those razzle-dazzle magical feelings—and magic acts.

The sparkles emoji can also mean clean, like sparkly clean, whether you’ve cleaned up your car or your life.

Bling bling! The sparkles emoji is used in plenty of posts about jewelry.

Don’t forget about glitter! The sparkles emoji is perfect for makeup applications.

And, perhaps most creatively, sexters might drop in a sparkles emoji to indicate that they’ve achieved orgasm.

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Note

This is not meant to be a formal definition of ✨ Sparkles emoji like most terms we define on Dictionary.com, but is rather an informal word summary that hopefully touches upon the key aspects of the meaning and usage of ✨ Sparkles emoji that will help our users expand their word mastery.

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