🐻Bear Emoji
Generally, the 🐻 emoji means a bear. People use it to express strength, or just to add a cute animal vibe to their message.
The 🐻 emoji represents a bear.
- Unicode
- U+1F43B
- Released
- 2010
- Shortcode
- :bear:
- Skin tones
- No
What does the 🐻 Bear emoji mean?
People search for it under a lot of different names. All of these point at the same character.
People also look for it as honey emoji.
Bear emoji on iPhone, Android, WhatsApp and X
The character you send is always U+1F43B. The picture is not: it is redrawn by each system, and the designs below number 9.
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.
Bear emoji copy and paste
Everything here is the same character in different notation — including the shortcode chat apps know it by, :bear:.
In your code
Pick the notation your language wants. They all resolve to the bear, code point U+1F43B.
How to type the 🐻 Bear emoji
Where the emoji key lives on each system — and the codes for when there is no picker at all.
Bear 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
Bear emoji combinations
Ready-made combos built around bear 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
Same emoji, different intent depending on who sent it and what came before.
What 🐻 means in other countries
A generic wildlife image in most chat, but it’s also an established self-identifier within LGBTQ+ community language.
“Bear” specifically refers to a subculture of larger, hairier gay men, a well-established self-identifier.
“Bear market” shorthand for a declining market, opposite of “bull”.
Long-standing national symbol and stereotype used in political cartoons and branding.
Before you send it: Context makes the meaning clear — finance, wildlife, and community slang rarely overlap in the same thread.
What 🐻 means on TikTok, WhatsApp and Discord
The character is the same everywhere, but the artwork and the reading of it change from app to app.
🐻 vs 🐻❄️ — what is the difference?
Two emojis that get mixed up constantly. They are different characters with different names.
Unicode name: Bear
Code: U+1F43B · added 2010
Shortcode: :bear:
Generally, the 🐻 emoji means a bear.
Unicode name: Polar Bear
Code: U+1F43B U+200D U+2744 U+FE0F · added 2020
Shortcode: :polar_bear:
Generally, it means you're feeling cool, strong, or a little bit funny.
Where the 🐻 Bear 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+1F43B 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
KDDI au E5C1, SoftBank E051.
Those codes are why it survived into the standard at all — Unicode had to keep Japanese messages readable.
Bear was approved as U+1F43B 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.