Why does a kaomoji show up as □ boxes?
The font on the reading phone has no picture for that character, so it draws an empty box (often called tofu) or a question mark instead. Your phone shows the face fine; your friend's doesn't. It happens with rare eyes and decorations from less common scripts.
The fix is to pick faces made of common characters — brackets, ^ _ ; and the Japanese ・ and ω are on practically every phone. Each page of the kaomoji dictionary lists every character of a face with its Unicode code point, so you can see which one is the rare one.
Why does ¯\_(ツ)_/¯ lose an arm in Discord or Slack?
Discord and Slack read a few characters as formatting. A backslash \ hides the character after it, and pairs of _ or * turn the text between them into italics or bold. So ¯\_(ツ)_/¯ shows up as ¯_(ツ)_/¯, and (*^▽^*) loses both stars.
Wrap the face in backticks to send it exactly as it is (it shows in a code font). For the shrug itself, both apps have a built-in /shrug command.
`¯\_(ツ)_/¯` `(*^▽^*)`How do I paste ASCII art without it bending?
Multi-line ASCII art only lines up in a monospace font, where every character is the same width. Discord and Slack switch to one when you put the art between three backticks on their own lines — a code block. The ``` copy button under each piece on this site copies it that way.
LINE, KakaoTalk, iMessage, WhatsApp, X and Instagram have no code blocks, so art bends there whatever you do. Send a one-line kaomoji instead, or a screenshot of the art. Narrow phones also wrap long lines, so art wider than about 30 characters may break even in a code block.
```
∧_∧
( ･ω･)
( つ旦O
```Why does a kaomoji use up more characters on X?
X counts characters by weight. Latin letters and most basic symbols count as 1, but Japanese characters, box-drawing lines and many shapes count as 2. The table flip (╯°□°）╯︵ ┻━┻ is 12 characters long but takes 20 of your 280; (≧▽≦) is 5 characters but counts as 8.
If a post is just over the limit, swap a face for a lighter one: ( ͡° ͜ʖ ͡°) counts exactly its length (11), and (^_^) counts 5.
Do kaomoji work in LINE, KakaoTalk and iMessage?
One-line kaomoji work in every chat app; what changes is the font on the reading phone. Faces built on stacked marks, like the eyebrows in ( ͡° ͜ʖ ͡°), can sit a little off on some phones but stay readable. Multi-line ASCII art bends in all three (see above).
How do I keep a face that works?
Once a face looks right on your friends' phones, save it: as a text shortcut on your phone, or as a favorite in the free Kawasuta app, which keeps favorites and recently used faces offline.