---
title: "Animated Waving Hand Emoji 👋 Using CSS"
date: 2019-04-17 14:20:10-0400
description: "How to make the 👋 waving hand emoji actually wave using pure CSS animation!"
tags:
  - CSS
  - Animation
  - Emoji
  - Keyframes
  - Cool Tricks
image: "images/codepen.png"
draft: false
---

# Howdy, friends! <span class="wave">👋</span>

If you examine [my homepage](/) long enough, you might notice the 👋 hand emoji at the top subtly waving at you. This was easily accomplished using a few lines of CSS with a feature called [`@keyframes`](https://developer.mozilla.org/en-US/docs/Web/CSS/@keyframes) — no bulky GIFs involved, and no JS mess or jQuery overkill required.

Below are the code snippets you can grab and customize to make your own 
["waving hand" 👋](https://emojipedia.org/waving-hand-sign/) emojis ***actually wave***, and a [CodePen playground](https://codepen.io/jakejarvis/pen/pBZWZw) for live testing.

{{< codepen username="jakejarvis" id="pBZWZw" left-tab="css" right-tab="result" >}}

### CSS:

```css
span.wave {
  animation-name: wave-animation;    /* Refers to the name of your @keyframes element below */
  animation-duration: 2.5s;          /* Change to speed up or slow down */
  animation-iteration-count: infinite;    /* Never stop waving :) */
  transform-origin: 70% 70%;         /* Pivot around the bottom-left palm */
  display: inline-block;
}

@keyframes wave-animation {
    0% { transform: rotate(  0.0deg) }
   10% { transform: rotate(-10.0deg) }    /* The following four values can be played with to make the waving more or less extreme */
   20% { transform: rotate( 12.0deg) }
   30% { transform: rotate(-10.0deg) }
   40% { transform: rotate(  9.0deg) }
   50% { transform: rotate(  0.0deg) }    /* Reset for the last half to pause */
  100% { transform: rotate(  0.0deg) }
}
```

### HTML:

```html {linenos=false}
<span class="wave">👋</span>
```

That's it! More skin tones can be [found on 📕Emojipedia](https://emojipedia.org/search/?q=waving+hand).

### <span class="wave">👋🏼</span> Toodles!