Copying the shrug without losing an arm
Tap the face in the grid and it is copied exactly as shown, with both arms. Most problems come after pasting. Apps that format messages with Markdown treat the backslash as an escape character: the backslash itself disappears, and the underscore after it shows as a plain underscore. The shrug arrives as ¯_(ツ)_/¯, one arm short.
The fix is to escape the escape. Type ¯\\\_(ツ)\_/¯ in those apps: the first pair of backslashes produces one visible backslash, the third keeps the underscore from starting italics, and the backslash before the right-hand underscore does the same on that side. If an app doesn’t format Markdown, the plain version from this page is already right, and the extra backslashes would show.
The other shrugs
┐(︶▽︶)┌and╮(╯∀╰)╭raise their hands with box-drawing corners instead of an arm, and can’t lose a piece to formatting.┐(￣ヘ￣)┌andヽ(ー_ー )ノare bored or unimpressed.¯\(°_o)/¯shrugs with one eye bigger than the other, for real confusion.¯\_(◉‿◉)_/¯keeps the classic arms with a wide-eyed grin.
Where the shrug comes from
The face in the middle is ツ, the katakana letter tsu, whose shape reads as two eyes and a smile. The hands are macrons (¯), an accent mark that sits high, so it looks like an open palm held up. It is one of the few kaomoji most people recognize even if they don’t know the word kaomoji, and it says “I don’t know” or “it is what it is” in one line.