The Melting Face Emoji
Some Visual Analysis For You
I love emojis. I especially love when they are used in opaque or unexpected ways. The melting face emoji joined the canon early in 2022. Recently, I’ve started noticing it as I scroll through the faces, trying to find one that conveys my tone correctly (usually I use one of these two because I feel like they cover a lot of bases: 🥳 😩). The melting face has felt like the right thing to send in an exceptionally wide array of contexts, and each time I’ve used it, I have thought to myself that I could not articulate what I mean by it and the person I am sending it to might understand it to mean something entirely different, anyway.
Here are some things it might mean:
I am melting from literal heat
I am melting from embarrassment
I am melting from the heat of your hotness
I am melting from the warmth of your sentiments
I have spent the day in a very summery way and now need to lay down
I am acting like I’m fine but I’m not, and I’m struggling to maintain the performance and soon I will break (my mask of fine-ness is melting off my face)
Oops, I made a mistake that is causing my or others’ plans to go awry (my plans are melting down into a puddle of nothingness)
I would like to disappear (for any reason)
I am acting coy
The apocalypse is coming and we are all in the slow process of decay
As I melt, I am pondering my own reflection in a narcissistic way / I am melting from my own narcissism
etc.
A poll of my Instagram followers returned various ideas, including these:
“Holding on for dear life”
“You make my heart melt/I cannot even” (← please note the contradiction within this single answer)
“THE HEAT BABE”
“I feel like it’s the new 🙃”
“Ennui”
“Having a mental breakdown but its all good”
“I’m just going to melt into the earth so no one can perceive me”
The basic idea that an image could read differently to other people is one that I think many of us forget about. This little melting dude is a particularly enigmatic example, but it’s also obviously one that we toss around without thinking about the ways the people we are sending it to could interpret it. It’s fun to live on the edge with emojis. But the vast possibility of meaning here is exactly why visual culture is interesting in general and also why it is important to talk about it. We consume so many images every day. When we talk about them, to our friends or on social media, we sometimes analyse them and the ways they communicate meaning. But we don’t often talk about the ways they might communicate different meanings to different people, and how that can result in miscommunication and also rich individual experience.
Visual analysis is one of the first skills you learn in an art history class, and I can still vividly remember how jarring it was to hear my classmates react to works of art in ways that were totally different to me. It also became one of the things I love the most about studying art - there are many “right answers” about a piece of art. It can be right to feel sad or happy when looking at the same painting. Your job is just to explain why you feel the way you do, and make a case for why that’s interesting/relevant or why it communicates something about the artist or school or period or whatever. Art is obviously a visual medium, and turning it into language is always imperfect. So there is always room for a variety of approaches, and they can all be true.
Anyway, I’ve been confused about the melting face emoji for a while now but I’ve still been using it. Not in spite of my confusion but because of it - I like leaning into the weirdness of sending this tiny image that seems to have so many meanings. It’s a funny little microcosm of why learning about art and looking at stuff is useful in more ways than we think.
Some Other Things I’m Thinking About
This really really good review from The White Pube of the Munch show at the Courtauld
Dirty Dancing, which hits different this summer
This essay about American Girl Dolls and meme accounts about them, especially how they were/are considered “radical” by some conservative parents
The incredibly luscious locks of all three Haim sisters, who I saw play in Leeds this week. WHAT do they put in their hair??