One thing about us? We love sexting. Hence why we’re always eager to bring you the very best sexting tips, tricks, and advice. Today’s lesson? The fine art of the sex emoji.
Yep, sexy emojis are very much a thing, and they’re basically your secret, sexy little weapon for heating up your next texting sesh. Whether you’re just testing the waters with a new crush or fully trying to let someone know you’re down to bone, these horny little guys are a great addition to your sexting vocabulary. Remember, above all else, sexting should be fun, and sprinkling in a few horny emojis here and there is a great way to keep the vibes on the perfect level of flirty yet freaky.
In addition to being fun as hell, sexting is also a great way to learn more about a new partner or build intimacy with a long-term one. As Elizabeth Dell, a certified sex educator and founder of the relationship intimacy app Amorus, previously told Cosmo, sexting “is great for turning you on, heating up your partner, exploring new ideas, and learning what excites you both.”
So if you’re ready to level up your sexting game so you can embrace all these benefits, then it’s time to get acquainted with the most common sex emojis and when to use them. But before we get into it, it’s important to note that not all sex emojis are created equal. Like, there are a few different subgenres—standard sex emojis, funny sex emojis, straight up dirty sex emojis, etc.—and knowing when to use which is really an art in and of itself.
For your edification, here’s your guide to the 40 sexiest sex emojis, including what they mean and how to use them.
Classic Sex Emojis
1. Fire: 🔥
Fire is one of the most versatile of the emojis, but in context, it can def convey horn. Use it to let your person know they’re hot, the sex you just had was hot, etc.
2. Smirk Face: 😏
The smirk face, while obviously horny, has to be used sparingly and with caution to work. It’s like the emoji equivalent of a wink (but not the actual wink emoji, which is more wholesome).
3. Eggplant: 🍆
The eggplant is probably the most sex emoji sex emoji to ever sex emoji. The unofficially official but universally agreed-upon penis emoji, this is pretty much the sex emoji that started it all.
4. Peach: 🍑
Peaches only rarely look like butt cheeks in real life, but on the emoji keyboard, every peach is An Ass. A string of 🍑🍑🍑 is a suitable, good, and sometimes horny response to a selfie in which someone’s butt looks good.
5. Sweat or (Is It?) Spray: 💦
Horny is an explicit feeling, but sometimes that feeling can be communicated with nuance: hence the sweat droplet emoji. Is it sweat? Is it jizz? Is it female ejaculate? Is it a wet detritus made up of all those things? That’s for the receiver of a text containing 💦 to decide. And that ambiguity? It’s horny.
6. Smiling Devil: 😈
This emoji is a little to corny to be horny, IMO, but it’s pretty much the classic “Impure Thoughts” emoji.
7. Hot Face: 🥵
Perfect for expressing metaphorical heat without going the fire emoji route, this horny lil guy screams, “Holy shit, you’re so hot, I worship the ground you walk on.” Use it sparingly for only the hottest of pics and sexts to let the object of your horn know you’re feeling some type of way.
Less Common Sex Emojis
8. Woozy Face: 🥴
“Mouth with uneven eyes” was released in early 2018. This unofficial “orgasm face” emoji is obviously horny, but better used in an ironic-horny way. You don’t want to punctuate an iMessage sext sesh with 🥴 to indicate your climax, know what I mean? Still, this little guy deserves horny credit where credit is due.
9. Exploding Head: 🤯
Translation: Mind-blowingly good sex, duh. However, because this emoji is sometimes used to express surprise, confusion, or even stress, you’re gonna want to make sure you supply at least a little context before you drop this one to your sex partner. Like, “Hey, that sex was literally mind-blowing 🤯. Thanks for the dicking down!”
10. Melting Face: 🫠
Like the head exploding emoji, you want to be careful to supply enough context here, as the melting face is usually used to convey exhaustion, embarrassment, or existential dread. In the right context, however, this little guy can suggest a state of weak-in-the-knees horniness, like, “You’re so hot I’m melting,” or, “I’m so horny for you right now my brain is literally turning to mush.”
11. Swirly-Eyed Hypnotized Face: 😵💫
Another emoji that usually conveys confusion or distress but can also be used to illustrate a mind-melting horniness haze. Best used in combination with the eggplant emoji to illustrate a state of straight-up dicknotism.
12. Saluting Face: 🫡
This is pretty much everyone’s fave emoji at the moment, and while it may not typically be super sexual (though some have argued that the saluting hand kind of looks like a dick), this obedient, upstanding gentleman definitely has some horny potential. If you trend at all submissive, you probably already see where I’m going with this. This emoji is very, “Yes Sir/Daddy.” Like, “Sir, yes sir, I *will* be naked in bed when you get home, per your request.”
13. Unicorn: 🦄
Okay, so a unicorn is a (sometimes controversial) term for someone who likes having threesomes with couples, so if you see a unicorn emoji in someone’s dating app bio, chances are that’s what they’re trying to signal. The more ya know! Also, a unicorn has a horn, so you might consider it a sneaky symbol for general horniness.
14. Nerd: 🤓
Sure, he *seems* all cute and innocent with his buck-teeth and his thick-rimmed glasses, but as anyone who went to high school knows, the shy, quiet types are always the horniest. These are just facts. If you ask me, this is the Sexually Confident Nerd Who Keeps His Glasses on During Sex emoji.
15. Banana and Cherry: 🍌🍒
You’re probably thinking we don’t need another set of fruit-/veggie-themed horny emojis (because, you know, eggplant and peach emojis already exist), but these are just too obvious not to include on this list. Beyond the obvious “cherry popping” connotation that comes with the cherry emoji, the shape they’re in can also allude to boobs (in addition to the double melon combo 🍈🍈). And as for the banana emoji, it’s a phallic-shaped fruit, so, enough said. (Honorable mention: the watermelon emoji 🍉—thank you, Harry Styles.)
16. Shower: 🚿
Ah, the shower emoji—harmless until you connect the dots. Said dots: wetness, squirting, another kind of shower (of the golden variety), and, of course, shower sex. Only to be used with explicit descriptions or on partners with whom these activities have happened IRL.
17. Woman Kneeling:🧎♀️
If you’re a submissive partner texting your dominant partner, this emoji doesn’t really need an explanation for why it’s horny as hell. You already know. Next one.
18. Face With Steam From Nose: 😤
While this emoji is usually used to represent anger or frustration, it’s also a great one to indicate how badly you want someone or how eager you are to hook up again, as in, “I want you to come over and do that again rn 😤.”
19. Hot Pepper: 🌶
This emoji is perfect for when you want to convey how hot or ~spicy~ you’re feeling. Used in combination with the hot face? Lethal. You’re getting laid tonight.
20. Pretzel: 🥨
The pretzel isn’t just the number one best snack you can get at the shopping mall food court. It’s also the name of a super-hot sex position, hence why the pretzel emoji is perfect for demonstrating how you want them to twist and position your body or for when you want to reminisce about how flexible they are during kinky bedroom activities.
Funny Sex Emojis
21. Flag Up Mailbox: 📫
Our friends over at Esquire blessed us with an in-depth argument as to why this eager little mailbox is actually deeply horny, and TBH, we’re convinced. Flag Up Mailbox has everything: veiled phallic imagery (the raised flag is a boner, get it?), the novelty of the unexpected, and, of course, the admittedly somewhat juvenile satisfaction of corrupting an otherwise totally run-of-the-mill image. You simply love to see it.
22. Screw: 🔩
A classic alternative to the words “fuck” and “bang,” the “screw” emoji speaks for itself. It’s far from the sexiest-looking emoji, but send your FWB one of these out of the blue and they’ll get it. Oh, they’ll get it.
23. Hammer: 🔨
Similar to the screw emoji, the hammer emoji is just another way to tell your person you want them to come ~pound~ you. Period.
24. Oyster: 🦪
Hiii it’s called an aphrodisiac. Drop this sultry little shellfish when you want to let your date know you’re definitely interested in dessert, if ya catch my drift.
25. Bursting Champagne Bottle: 🍾
I mean, it’s an orgasm. Get it? You get it.
26. Electric Plug: 🔌
Often used as slang for another type of plug (you know), the electric plug emoji doesn’t immediately come to mind when you’re thinking about sex. But what do you do with a plug? You put it in a wall socket. The penetrating partner? Plug. The receiving partner? Socket. Moral of the story? Everything can be made dirty if you have the right imagination.
27. Bone: 🦴
See: everything we said earlier about the screw. Use when referring to their boner, peen, how hard they are/might be, the next time you’re boning, the last time you boned, how badly you want to jump their bones…you get the idea.
28. Lollipop: 🍭
Alexa, play “Lollipop,” by Lil Wayne. Any sext with the word “suck” will be made ten times hotter with this emoji, trust.
Flirty Sex Emojis
29. Kissy Face or Kiss Mark: 😘💋
As far as horniness goes, these guys are pretty low-key. But they still heavily imply a desire to get all up in someone’s business.
30. Heart Eyes: 😍
The only reason the heart eyes emoji isn’t classified above with the kissy face or kiss mark is because it can be used somewhat sarcastically in extremely sexual dirty talk sext-uations. It has range. Think: “I love your face 😍” but also “I can’t wait for you to cum on my face 😍.”
31. Side Eyes: 👀
One of my favorite horny emojis that doesn’t get used nearly enough is the simple side eyes. The eyes literally say a nonverbal “I see you.” You can almost feel the blush and lip bite that would accompany these goggling eyes IRL.
32. Flaming Heart: ❤️🔥
The most overtly lusty of the heart emojis, the flaming heart is a way of conveying hot, fiery passion. If you wanna let someone know you love them in a I’m so freaking into you I just wanna rip your clothes off every time I see you kinda way, allow this fire heart to do the talking for you.
33. Angel Face: 😇
The overt innocence of the angel-face emoji means it’s most effectively deployed to offset a graphically horny sext or otherwise explicit message. It’s like the “Who, me?” of emojis. It might seem far from any horny meaning at first, but context is everything, baby! This emoji can turn an already dialed-up sext into an even hotter sext, because self-awareness. Maybe you seem pretty vanilla but you’re feeling particularly not-vanilla that day. Pepper in some angel-face emojis to show your multitudes.
34. Eager Tongue Face: 😛
Sometimes you can be horny for something that isn’t sex, namely a really good-looking piece of food, and that is what 😛 is best for. A string of 😛😛😛 is equally appropriate in response to a sizzling plate of fajita meat as it is to a flash-on mirror selfie in a bikini. It’s horny because no one would respond this way—tongue out, eyes wide open—in real life when feeling horned up, but over text? It works.
35. Blushy Smile: 😊
There remains shockingly little consensus among emoji users as to which is the appropriate orgasm emoji. Yes, there’s the Woozy one (🥴), but as we’ve previously established, that one’s better for ironic-horny purposes than actual sexting, meaning there’s still no easy but not-cringey way to politely let a sexting partner know you just came and it’s time to wrap things up. So allow us to suggest this blushy smile emoji. Look at her, she’s grinning ear-to-ear, all sex-flushed and basking in a post-coital glow. She’s the ideal cute-not-cringe orgasm emoji, if you ask us.
Dirty Sex Emojis
36. Lip Biting: 🫦
Another one that’s so overtly sexual that it’s almost a little *too* on the nose to be truly horny. But if you’re feeling bold and can pull it off, go for it.
37. Fingering: 🫴
This (no, not this 👉) is the official fingering emoji and that’s final. You’re welcome!
38. Pinched Fingers: 🤌
From what I understand, this was supposed to be the pinched fingers emoji, like the gesture your Italian grandma would make when she’s telling you not to disgrace her famous pasta sauce by using canned tomatoes. Unfortunately for your Italian grandma, however, this emoji has found alternative meaning as the fisting emoji. You’ve been warned.
39. Cat: 🐱
I don’t have to explain this one, right? This, very much not to be confused with any of the cat emoticons (😺😹😻), is the official pussy emoji and I shan’t be hearing otherwise.
40. This Immature Hand Motion: 👉👌
We all have this friend—let’s call him Mike—who, no matter the situation, is obsessed with making a sexual joke. Mike says things like “That’s what she said” but at the office. Mike is always muttering things under his breath, and when you say, “What was that?” he repeats his inappropriate joke at a higher volume and you immediately regret egging Mike on. This is the horny emoji combination preferred by Mikes. Yet it raises an interesting point: While this emoji string isn’t inherently horny, there is horny energy to someone who confidently whips out the 👉👌 in 2024.
