Editorial Policy: How FaceMoji.net Checks Faces

FaceMoji.net’s editorial policy explains how the FaceMoji editorial team decides what to publish about emoji faces: names and code points from the Unicode Standard, rendering notes from real devices, and meanings described as common usage with corrections dated on the page.

What this policy commits us to

Character names and code points come from the Unicode Standard, never from another emoji site.
Rendering notes come from looking at real devices, because appearance has no register to check.
Where usage has drifted from the formal name, we say both instead of only the flattering one.
We publish no usage statistics we cannot measure.
Corrections happen on the page, with the date moving. No silent edits, no backdating.

This page describes how FaceMoji decides what to publish. Emoji reference has a specific weakness: almost everything about a character is checkable except the part readers most want to know, which is what it means — and that is exactly the part most sites state with the greatest confidence.

Last updated: 30 August 2026 · Published by the FaceMoji editorial team

Three kinds of claim, three kinds of evidence

The most useful thing we do is keep these separate. Collapsing them is what produces confident nonsense.

Claim	Example	How it is established
Definitional	The character’s name and code point	The Unicode code chart. Fixed, checkable, not a matter of opinion
Visual	How it looks on Android vs iOS	Looking at real devices. No register exists; vendors redraw at will
Usage	What people mean by it	Observation, stated as observation — never as a ruling

The third row is where we are most careful. Usage is real information and it is not authoritative, so it gets hedged language on purpose. “Commonly used to mean” is not weak writing; it is the accurate claim. A site that tells you what an emoji means, full stop, is overstating what anyone can know.

Why we do not copy other emoji sites

Character names come from the standard itself. Never from another emoji site, not even as a starting point.

A wrong name is unusually durable. One site publishes it, others copy because it is already on the web, and years later it is the name everybody uses without one person having opened the chart — because opening the chart is the exact step that got skipped. Copying is where that starts.

The name-versus-usage gap

A character’s formal name is fixed when it is encoded. How people use it keeps moving, and sometimes ends up far from the name.

When the two diverge, we give both: the formal name because it is the checkable fact, and the current usage because it is what you actually came to find out. Reporting only the official name is technically correct and practically useless; reporting only the street meaning discards the one part that is verifiable.

Rendering: the only test is looking

There is no specification for what an emoji should look like. Vendors design their own artwork and revise it between releases, which is why the same character can read as warm on one phone and strained on another.

So rendering notes come from looking, not from reading a chart, and they carry the caveat that a vendor may redraw the character next release. Where a difference is large enough to change the message a reader receives, that goes on the page — because it is the failure most likely to cause a real misunderstanding.

Numbers we will not publish

We do not publish emoji popularity rankings, “most used in 2026” lists, or percentage breakdowns of what people mean by a face. We have no way to measure any of it, and a plausible-looking fabricated number does more damage than an absent one — it gets quoted.

Where we do give a number, it comes with what it is and where it came from, or it does not appear.

Corrections

Errors are fixed on the page where they appeared, and the last-updated date moves with the fix. We do not edit silently, we do not delete a page to make a mistake vanish, and we do not backdate.

Corrections from readers are the most valuable mail we get, particularly about rendering: platform artwork changes and we cannot check every device every release. The contact page says what to include.

Independence and authorship

No sponsored content, no paid placement, no affiliate links. Nothing appears here because someone paid for it.

Pages are published by the FaceMoji editorial team and signed that way. We do not invent a named expert, a photograph or a credential to look more authoritative, because a fabricated byline is a lie about the most easily checked thing on the page. Who we are is on the about page; how we work is here.

Back to Emoji faces.

Editorial Policy — Three Kinds of Claim