The Brief: The fingers touching emoji combo 👉👈has come to represent shyness, spreading as a meme about people being shy or hesitant.

Bluesquiggle
DEEP DIVE

🥺👉👈 Fingers Touching Emoji

The fingers touching emoji use two pointing finger emojis (pointing right 👉 and pointing left 👈) facing the opposite direction and are often paired with 🥺, the pleading face emoji. Online, this has come to represent someone who is shy, often in an exaggerated way.

This meme seems to reference anime characters who twiddle or touch their fingers together to demonstrate shyness. In March 2020, this meme became more widespread, appearing in viral tweets and in a TikTok trend called #ShyKids. These videos also use feet with toes pointed towards each other to show a similar form of shyness.

These emoji and their corresponding “shy memes” inspired people to start using the emoji pointed the opposite direction 👈👉to signify confidence. Thus the inward-pointing emoji combination represents introversion while the outward-facing ones represent extroversion.

In addition to representing shyness or apprehension, fingers touching emoji can also be used in a flirtatious way, sometimes to show that someone is submissive in more NSFW contexts.

I’m Shy Memes

Fingers touching emoji and “I’m shy” memes are often paired with cutesy internet words and phrases like uwu, owo, and I’m baby. They’re often paired with words written as if they’re being spoken in a baby voice or put through an uwu translator. The meme can be used both ironically and as a way to shyly and indirectly talk about being shy.

Emma Chamberlain is in on the meme:

Shy clown with fingers touching: