Today, we live in a culture where GIFs, memes, and emojis are often how we naturally respond and communicate with people. That is because they are perfect for displaying our emotions without words and are easy to understand.
However, emojis have been leveled up to a completely different level to a new concept of Biao Qing Baos, made popular by WeChat.
What Are Biao Qing Baos?
Biao Qing Bao (表情包) literally means “a pack of facial expressions”.
They are essentially “sticker sets” and are usually made up of GIFs of things such as popular popular movie scenes, funny images, and cute animations and/or illustrations. Pair them up with a line of text (or not!), and a sticker is created.
While emojis are sets provided by the device company, biao qing baos can be created by anybody and is available for everybody to use!
WeChat Sticker Platform : This website is where you can design and upload your own stickers, and it gives a daily ranking of how popular the sticker is.
Here are some examples of biao qing baos:
This set is based off of Olympic swimmer Fu YuanHui’s overly excited reaction to her 3rd place backstroke time. If you haven’t seen the videos of her, this set sums up her emotions pretty accurately.
The one on the bottom left translates to: “I’m not expecting anything tomorrow, because I’m already happy with today!” The one above says “I have given my everything!”
These stickers are the faces of Zhang Yi Shan, a Chinese actor. Clearly, these express complete annoyance and helplessness in the second one (very relatable at times).
Not only are biao qing baos useful for expressing what you’re feeling, you can also use them to ask someone out! The first one says “do you wanna go on a date?”.
The next one says “you have grabbed my full attention.” A perfect segway into making your friend spill.
Even cats can be biao qing baos! The first one is a cat curled up, with the words “I’m crying”. The other is obviously an angry cat with the caption “I’m getting angrier and angrier”.
Which one is your favorite?
Make Your Own!
On WeChat, you can even make your own stickers (and it’s free!).
Here is how:
1) Open a chat with anybody, then open your keyboard and click on the emoji icon.
2) Then, at the bottom, there is a peace sign icon, and click on that to open the camera.
3) Take a video of yourself or anything you like! You can also speak so the caption is automatically recorded.
4) After recording, you can type your own caption. You can also change the color of the font.
5) Once you’re happy with it, just click the green check mark and you’re done!
6) Your new sticker should appear in the section with the peace sign icon. Send it to somebody!
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