The eggplant emoji 🍆 is most commonly used as a sexual innuendo to represent a penis, especially in flirty chats and sexting, rather than the actual vegetable.

Quick Scoop: What Does the Eggplant Emoji Mean?

Main meaning (the one people usually mean)

In most online conversations today, the eggplant emoji:

  • Stands in for male genitalia in a playful or suggestive way.
  • Shows up in sexting, flirty DMs, dating app chats, or jokes with a sexual undertone.
  • Is often paired with other emojis like the peach 🍑 (butt/sexual meaning) or fire 🔥 to make the sexual context even clearer.

Because this meaning is so widespread, many platforms and communities treat 🍆 as “NSFW” or at least borderline explicit. Instagram has even limited or shadowbanned it in some sexual contexts in the past.

Other (Less Spicy) Meanings

Even though the sexual meaning is dominant, context matters a lot:

  • Literal food: Talking about recipes, grocery lists, gardening, or vegetarian meals. Example: “Can you grab 🍆 at the store?”
  • Cultural symbolism:
    • In Japan, eggplants can be associated with good luck in “first dream of the year” traditions.
  • Brand or title: “Eggplant Emoji” can also be the name of blogs, newsletters, or creative projects, where the phrase is used for humor or branding rather than as a literal emoji in a text.

If you’re unsure what someone means, look at the rest of the message: a string like “🍆🔥🍑” in a DM is almost certainly sexual; a cooking group chat about “🍆 parm” is probably just dinner.

Why It Turned Sexual

A few reasons the eggplant emoji ended up with this reputation:

  • Its elongated, rounded shape made it an easy visual metaphor for a penis.
  • Social media (Twitter, Tumblr, Instagram) popularized it in sexual jokes and memes, and that usage spread quickly through younger users and dating culture.
  • Surveys on emoji use in romantic chats often list 🍆 among the top “hidden meaning” emojis for sexual or flirty conversation.

It was originally just a food emoji in Unicode (aubergine), but online culture repurposed it.

When You Should (and Shouldn’t) Use It

Generally safe places to use 🍆:

  • Private chats with someone you already flirt with and who understands the tone.
  • Jokes or memes in informal friend groups that are okay with sexual humor.
  • Cooking / gardening / food content where the context is obviously about the vegetable.

Places where 🍆 is usually a bad idea:

  • Work emails, Slack/Teams channels, or anything professional. It’s widely considered inappropriate there.
  • School-related chats with teachers or formal groups.
  • Public posts where audience and age range are mixed and you can’t be sure how it will be taken.

If you’re messaging someone and you don’t know whether they’re familiar with the sexual meaning, it’s safer not to use it, or to stick to clear language instead of relying on innuendo.

Quick TL;DR

  • In 2026, if someone sends you 🍆, they almost always mean a sexual reference to a penis, especially in flirty or explicit chats.
  • It can still literally mean “eggplant” in food or gardening contexts, but that’s less common in casual online slang.
  • Avoid it in professional or formal communication, since its sexual meaning is widely recognized.

Information gathered from public forums or data available on the internet and portrayed here.