Tweet showing the HeyGuys emote woman in a purple dress waving beside two men at Twitch office

HeyGuys

2014Twitch emoteclassic

Published August 28, 2026

HeyGuys is a Twitch emote showing Selen Akay, a former Twitch recruiter, waving hello, added to the platform at the end of November 2014. It grew into one of the most-fired greetings in Twitch chat, hit millions of times a day at its peak and turning Akay into an accidental icon of livestream chat culture.

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Overview

The emote is a cropped photo of Akay mid-wave with a soft grin, sized to render inline in a Twitch chat message3. Viewers post it as a collective hello, typically when a stream starts, when the broadcaster greets chat, or when a familiar name shows up. It carries no sarcasm, HeyGuys reads as a straight greeting, the chat equivalent of walking into a room and waving.

Its staying power came from what it filled in. Twitch's most-hit emotes lean sarcastic, Kappa for irony, PogChamp for hype, and HeyGuys gave chat a sincere hello slot in the default toolkit. Once viewers learned the sequence at stream start, it became muscle memory across thousands of channels.

Origin & Background

Platform
Twitch
Creator
Selen Akay
Date
2014

HeyGuys is also the Twitch handle of Selen Akay, a former recruiting director at Twitch who streams on the platform under the same name2. The emote based on her photo entered circulation at the end of November 20143. Akay later broke down the story of how her face ended up on the emote herself in a January 4, 2017 post to Twitch's official Facebook page.

How It Spread

HeyGuys grew into a fixture of Twitch chat within a couple of years of launch, spammed by viewers who often had no idea whose face they were posting. Chatters got their first close look at the person behind it on February 28, 2015, when Twitter user @ChasejustChase posted a photo of Akay to help people connect the emote to a real face3. She appeared on Twitch's Facebook page again on February 25, 2016 alongside the model behind MingLee, another cropped-face emote in the same wave. In early 2019 she filmed a short video introducing herself to kids who recognized her from stream chat but had no idea she was a real person.

Off Twitch, the phrase "hey guys" picked up its own detached joke life on Urban Dictionary, where top entries frame it as the awkward opener of someone trying to muscle their way into a group conversation they were not invited to1.

How to Use This Meme

HeyGuys typically opens a Twitch chat session. Common convention is to post it at the very start of a stream, right after the broadcaster says hi to chat, or when a new viewer types their first message. It usually gets spammed collectively rather than posted once, and because it reads sincere, it tends to stand alone rather than mixing into layered emote combos like some sarcastic staples.

Frequently Asked Questions