Moai Emoji

About

The Moai Emoji 🗿, also known as Moyai Emoji, is an emoji that looks similar to the head statues found on Easter Island, Chile. However, this particular representation of the statues is based on the Moai Statue in Tokyo, Japan, which was inspired by the Easter Island statues.^[3] The emoji is commonly associated with the Vine Thud Sound Effect.

Origin

In October 2010, Moai emoji was added to Unicode 6.0.^[1] The emoji can be found on a variety of platforms, including Apple, Google, Microsoft and more (shown below).

Spread

Four years later, on March 1st, 2014, HuffPost^[2] included the emoji in the article "The Actual Meanings Behind The Most Mysterious And Pointless Emojis." They write, "And, as it turns out, that grey face is not an Easter Island Statue or Squidward’s house. It’s called a Moai and it represents this real statue" (shown below, center).

Later that year, on August 2nd, the official Emojipedia Twitter tweeted^[4] an image of both the emoji and the statues. They captioned the post, "🗿 Moyai. A statue in Shibuya Tokyo, inspired by rock carvings on Easter Island" (shown below, right).

On August 16th, 2018, Forbes^[6] reported that Fortnite players were searching for "Stone Heads" that look similar to the Moai Statue.

Starting in November 2018, the Moai emoji has been used as a shitpost, primarily on Instagram. On November 17th, 2019, Instagram user @yaomarso the first edit featuring the emoji to the platform, with the post gaining over 9,100 likes and 80,000 views in six months.^[7]

On the same day, Instagram ^[5] user @cringey.meme posted a deep-fried version of the emoji. The post received more than 14,000 likes in less than two weeks.

On November 18th, 2018, Redditor mortizauge asked the /r/OutOfTheLoop subreddit, "I have been seeing it pop up on meme subreddits but I can't track its source nor find its meaning. Is this one of those nonsensical memes that just appear out of nowhere or does it have an actual backstory?" Redditor Stanzelite responded:

It was popularized by the arguable king of instagram/Snapchat memes Trayvon vert @lolhylian is his account where it all originated. For the past 2 months instead of actually putting captions for his memes he’s just been putting the 🗿 emoji and replacing it with punchlines as well. It’s presumably because it’s such a fucking useless emoji that it reached meme level Bec who the hell is gonna unironically use an Easter island emoji in a conversation. Sort of like the 🅱️ emoji from a year and a half ago."

Search Interest

External References