Animated Waving Hand Emoji 👋 Using CSS

Howdy, friends! 👋

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 — 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” 👋 emojis actually wave, and a CodePen playground for live testing.

Demo

CSS

.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(14.0deg) }  /* The following five values can be played with to make the waving more or less extreme */
   20% { transform: rotate(-8.0deg) }
   30% { transform: rotate(14.0deg) }
   40% { transform: rotate(-4.0deg) }
   50% { transform: rotate(10.0deg) }
   60% { transform: rotate( 0.0deg) }  /* Reset for the last half to pause */
  100% { transform: rotate( 0.0deg) }
}

HTML

<h1>Hi there! <span class="wave">👋</span></h1>

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That’s it! More hands and skin tones can be found on 📕 Emojipedia.

👋🏼 Toodles!