🎂Birthday Cake Emoji
Generally, it means wishing someone a happy birthday. People often use it to show they’re thinking of someone on their special day.
The 🎂 emoji is a birthday cake with candles.
- Unicode
- U+1F382
- Released
- 2010
- Shortcode
- :birthday:
- Skin tones
- No
- Popularity
- #24 most used
What does the 🎂 Birthday Cake emoji mean?
One character, many names — these are the wordings people actually type, all 8 of them.
Birthday Cake emoji on iPhone, Android, WhatsApp and X
The character is always U+1F382 — but every vendor draws it their own way. This is what your birthday cake looks like to the person on the other side.
iPhone, iPad, macOS
Android, Gmail, Chrome
X, Discord, Twemoji apps
Facebook, Messenger
Open-source, design systems
Galaxy, One UI
Windows, Teams, Fluent
WhatsApp on Android
Slack, Discord themes
See the whole set the way each system draws it — iPhone emojis, Android emojis, WhatsApp emojis and Discord emojis.
Birthday Cake emoji copy and paste
Everything here is the same character in different notation — including the shortcode chat apps know it by, :birthday:.
In your code
Different notation, one result: whichever escape you paste, what comes out is U+1F382.
How to type the 🎂 Birthday Cake emoji
Where the emoji key lives on each system — and the codes for when there is no picker at all.
Birthday Cake emoji PNG and SVG
Transparent PNG and SVG for thumbnails, decks and design files — one file per vendor, which makes 9. Artwork belongs to whoever drew it, so check the licence before commercial use.
Apple
Google
Twitter / X
Birthday Cake emoji combinations
Ready-made combos built around birthday cake for bios, captions and comments. Tap to copy.
Want two emojis fused into one sticker instead of set side by side? Emoji Kitchen does that with 🎂, and there are more ready-made pairs in emoji combinations and aesthetic emoji combos.
What 🎂 means from a girl or a guy
Who sent the birthday cake and what came before it change the reading more than the emoji itself does.
What 🎂 means in other countries
A near-universal celebration symbol, though some religious groups don’t mark birthdays at all, worth a beat of thought in mixed company.
Standard shorthand for “happy birthday” or celebration in general.
Birthdays aren’t observed on religious grounds, so the greeting may not land as intended.
Before you send it: Safe as a default birthday greeting; if you know someone doesn’t celebrate, a plain “congrats” works better.
What 🎂 means on TikTok, WhatsApp and Discord
Chat apps do not change U+1F382, they change what it looks like and what people take it to mean.
Where the 🎂 Birthday Cake emoji came from
This one is older than Unicode emoji: Japanese carriers were drawing it on their handsets years before the standard existed, which it finally joined in 2010.
Same character every time — U+1F382 never changed. Only the drawing did, and only because each vendor redraws its own set. Someone on an older phone still sees the older picture.
Long before Unicode had emoji, Japanese carriers shipped their own picture sets.
🎂 existed there as
NTT DoCoMo E686, KDDI au E5A0, SoftBank E34B.
Those codes are why it survived into the standard at all — Unicode had to keep Japanese messages readable.
Birthday Cake was approved as U+1F382 and shipped in Emoji 0.6 (2010). Emoji 0.6 is the original 2010 batch that came over from the Japanese sets.
Every vendor keeps its own artwork, so 🎂 is redrawn by Apple, Google, Twitter / X, Facebook, OpenMoji, Samsung, Microsoft, WhatsApp, JoyPixels. The character you send never changes — only the picture does.