WhatsApp: What does the emoji of painted nails mean?

The mass popularity acquired by emoticons has generated a new way of communicating moods, feelings, reactions and even complete sentences. However, despite having the same Unicode encoding, its interpretation is subject to different cultural contexts depending on the environment of the person who uses them, especially when the different platforms have their own design. This is the case of the hand with painted nails.

The emoji belongs to the Faces and People category on Emojipedia, and shows a hand with nail polish being applied to the fingernails. Its literal meaning is very clear due to its graphic composition: nail painting, hand care, manicure, among others related to beauty.

However, there is also another use for the emoji, since users often express an air of indifference or lack of interest when they send the icon on WhatsApp, since the image itself evokes a feeling of real distance.

In March 2014, Alexander Abad-Santos and Allie Jones described the hand with inked nails as the Beyonce of emojis in a post by The Atlantic, as it could be used for anything from shutting up haters, expressing a feeling satisfaction with an achievement or even say “I don’t care about anything”.

Usually the nail polish color is shown in shades of red, pink or purple, depending on the platforms and their applications, but this does not really affect the meaning of the emoji.

In the case of Android and Windows, they even showed a bottle of nail polish in previous versions.

Its official name is Nail Polish and it was approved as part of Unicode 6.0 since 2010 and a few years later, it was added to Emoji 1.0 in 2015.