Cat With Tears Of Joy Emoji

A yellow cat face with a wide grin, teeth showing, and tears streaming down its cheeks. 😹 is 😂 Face with Tears of Joy wearing cat ears. Same reaction, different species.

The cat face emoji set exists because a Japanese phone company employee liked cats. Emojipedia confirmed that au by KDDI added cat face emojis to their proprietary set in 2003, and when the Unicode Consortium standardized emoji in 2010, they kept all nine (😺😸😹😻😼😽🙀😿😾) for backwards compatibility. That's why cats have nine face emojis and dogs have one (🐶). It's not favoritism; it's legacy code from a 2003 carrier decision.

In practice, 😹 carries a slightly different tone than 😂. On TikTok, users perceive cat emojis as more sarcastic and ironic than their human equivalents. The internet has always associated cats with smug superiority (Grumpy Cat, "I can haz judgment"), and that energy bleeds through. Using 😹 instead of 😂 can make a laugh feel more "laughing at you" than "laughing with you." A 2015 Oxford study on sarcasm in written communication found that emoticons function as efficient markers of ironic intent. Cat emoticons carry that load harder than human ones.

Here's the weird part: 😹 survived the tears-of-joy decline. When Gen Z declared 😂 officially cringe in 2021, millennials were told to switch to 😭 or 💀. 😹 escaped that fate. Our Google Trends data shows searches for "😹" holding steady at 1-2 index points for six years while 😂 spiked to 98, 😭 climbed from 8 to 44, and 💀 tripled. The cat version was always too niche to be cancelled. Being small has advantages.

Cats have been called the "unofficial mascot of the Internet". CNN estimated 6.5 billion cat pictures online in 2015, and YouTube hosted over 2 million cat videos. 😹 is one piece of a much larger cultural phenomenon that keeps producing new mascots: the Thumbs Up Crying Cat (viral April 2020), the Cat Pointing and Laughing meme (October 2023), Beluga, chipi chipi chapa chapa. The cat-with-big-emotion format keeps winning. 😹 is the emoji shorthand for all of it.

The personality signal. People who use 😹 instead of 😂 are making a choice. They identify with cats, they like being slightly different, or they think the cat version is funnier. In friend groups, the 😹 user is a known quantity. Everyone else sends 😂 or 💀, and that one person sends 😹. It's an identity thing more than a meaning thing.

The sarcasm edge. Urban Dictionary's entry on cat emojis notes that on TikTok and Twitter, 😹 carries a slightly meaner tone than 😂. Using 😹 in response to someone's mistake reads more like smug amusement than sympathetic laughter. The internet has always treated cats as judgmental observers (Grumpy Cat, "if I fits I sits"), and that cultural association colors how people read the emoji.

Cat content. Obviously, 😹 appears in replies to funny cat videos, memes, and photos. If a cat knocks a glass off a table, the correct reaction is 😹 not 😂. Using the human version would be a missed opportunity.

Group chats. 😹 in a group chat often becomes one person's signature emoji. It functions as a personality marker: "I'm the cat person of this friend group." Research from Psychology Today shows that self-identified cat people score higher on openness and intellectual curiosity than dog people, which tracks with choosing the quirkier emoji option.

The nine cat face emojis trace back to 2003, when the Japanese phone carrier au by KDDI added them to their proprietary emoji set. The cat face set mirrors the nine most common human facial expressions, just with pointy ears and whiskers.

Japan's love of cats isn't accidental. The maneki-neko (beckoning cat) has been a cultural fixture since at least the 17th century. Cat cafes originated in Taiwan in 1998 but exploded in Japan in the 2000s, with the first Japanese cat cafe opening in Osaka in 2004, one year after au by KDDI added cat emojis. The timing isn't coincidental. Japan was in the middle of a cat culture boom.

When the Unicode Consortium standardized emoji in 2010, they included all nine cat faces for backwards compatibility with Japanese carrier sets. Shigetaka Kurita, who designed the original 176 emojis for NTT DoCoMo in 1999, included a cat emoji in that foundational set, but au by KDDI expanded it into a full expression range.

A Quora thread asking "Why do cats have so many emojis but dogs don't?" has been viewed hundreds of thousands of times. The answer: blame au by KDDI and Japan's 2003 cat obsession.

Meanwhile, cats were becoming the internet's dominant species. LOLcats originated on 4chan in 2005. I Can Has Cheezburger launched in January 2007 and sold for $2 million later that year. Keyboard Cat went viral in 2009. Nyan Cat broke the internet in April 2011. Grumpy Cat hit Reddit in September 2012 and earned an estimated $100 million in her lifetime. By the time emoji went mainstream in 2015, cats already owned the internet. 😹 arrived at the party already inside.

Approved in Unicode 6.0 (2010) as U+1F639U+1F639 CAT FACE WITH TEARS OF JOY. Added to Emoji 1.0 in 2015. Part of the nine-member cat face set (😺😸😹😻😼😽🙀😿😾) that originated from au by KDDI's proprietary emoji set in 2003. Does not support skin tone modifiers (it's a cat).

• 😿
  2014: Sad Cat (Schmuserkadser): First photoshopped crying cat appears on [Meme Generator June 11, 2014](https://knowyourmeme.com/memes/crying-cat). Eyes manipulated to look uncomfortably wet. Spreads via ask.fm and the German image board pr0gramm, where it picks up the name Schmuserkadser.
• 👍
  2019-2020: Thumbs Up Crying Cat: [Reddit user IAMAdumbgirl posts](https://knowyourmeme.com/memes/thumbs-up-crying-cat) the thumbs-up-with-sad-cat combo to r/sadcats on June 17, 2019. April 2020: goes mega-viral on Twitter as pandemic compliance energy. Becomes shorthand for "yes, I am fine, no I am not."
• 🫂
  2021-2022: Beluga Cat: A fat cat edited into Discord avatars with speech bubbles. Dominates Discord meme culture 2021-2022. Cat + relatable self-deprecation = engagement gold.
• 👉
  October 2023: Cat Pointing and Laughing: [Viral on YouTube via SevTube](https://knowyourmeme.com/memes/cat-pointing-and-laughing) October 15, 2023. A cat mid-yowl with a pointing finger emoji overlaid. Used for mocking. Becomes a Twitch emote within weeks. Pure 😹 energy in image form.
• 🎵
  2024-2025: Chipi Chipi Chapa Chapa: A cat bobbing to a Phonk remix of 'Dubidubidu.' 600M+ TikTok views. Proves the cat-with-sound format is still inexhaustible a decade after LOLcats.

• •Dogs have one face emoji (🐶) while cats have nine (😺😸😹😻😼😽🙀😿😾). The gap exists because au by KDDI included cat faces in their 2003 emoji set, and Unicode kept them all for backwards compatibility.
• •Cats have been called the "unofficial mascot of the Internet". CNN estimated 6.5 billion cat pictures existed online in 2015, with YouTube hosting over 2 million cat videos.
• •Grumpy Cat earned an estimated $100 million in her lifetime from merchandising, appearances, and licensing. Cat memes aren't just fun; they're a billion-dollar industry.
• •The Nyan Cat GIF sold as an NFT for roughly $600,000 in February 2021, a decade after the meme was created.
• •A study in digital psychology found that browsing cat memes for 10 minutes measurably increased participants' energy and emotional positivity. Cat content is quantifiably therapeutic.
• •Self-identified cat people score higher on openness and intellectual curiosity than dog people, according to multiple psychology studies. They're also 11% more likely to score high on openness to new experiences.
• •😹 survived the 2021 Gen Z 😂 cringe purge completely untouched. Google Trends data from 2020 to 2026 shows 😹 flat at 1-2 index points the entire time, while 😂 spiked to 98 in 2023 and 😭 went 5.5× from 8 to 44. Niche has its privileges.
• •The crying cat meme that dominates Twitter reaction culture started in June 2014 on a random Meme Generator page. The Thumbs Up Crying Cat variant didn't arrive until June 2019 and only went fully viral in April 2020 during the first pandemic wave. It took six years for the format to peak.
• •Among the nine cat face emojis, 😻 (heart eyes) is searched roughly 2× as often as 😹 globally. 😺 (the neutral smiling cat face) is actually the second most searched cat emoji, not 😹. People often grab the generic cat first and the tears-of-joy cat as a deliberate swap for 😂.

• •Cats have been called the "unofficial mascot of the Internet". By 2015, CNN estimated 6.5 billion cat pictures existed online, with YouTube hosting over 2 million cat videos. 😹 is one node in this massive cultural phenomenon.
• •Grumpy Cat (Tardar Sauce, 2012-2019) hit Reddit on September 22, 2012, and her first post got 25,300 upvotes in 24 hours. She earned an estimated $100 million in her lifetime through merchandising, appearances, and a Lifetime movie. She won BuzzFeed's Meme of the Year at the 2013 Webby Awards. If any emoji captures her energy, it's 😼 (smirking cat), but 😹 is the laugh her fans produce.
• •I Can Has Cheezburger, launched January 11, 2007, was one of the first websites to prove that cat content could be a real business. It peaked at 1.5 million daily hits and sold for $2 million in September 2007. LOLcats, which started on 4chan in 2005, created an entire dialect (lolspeak) and helped normalize the idea that caring about cats online was culturally acceptable rather than embarrassing.
• •Nyan Cat (April 2011) combined a Japanese pop song with a Pop-Tart-bodied cat flying through space leaving a rainbow trail. It won the 2012 Webby Award for Meme of the Year. Creator Christopher Torres sold the original GIF as an NFT for ~$600,000 in February 2021.
• •A psychological study found that participants who spent 10 minutes browsing cat memes reported higher levels of energy and emotional positivity. Cat content isn't just entertaining; it's measurably therapeutic.

• •😹 is U+1F639U+1F639. Common shortcodes: :joy_cat::joy_cat: (Slack, Discord, GitHub).
• •The full cat face set spans U+1F638U+1F638 through U+1F63FU+1F63F plus U+1F640U+1F640. All are in the Emoticons block.
• •Cat face emojis do not support skin tone modifiers (because they're cats, not human hands).
• •The cat face set is a parallel of the human face set: 😹 mirrors 😂, 😻 mirrors 😍, 😿 mirrors 😢, 🙀 mirrors 😱, etc.

See the full Emoji Developer Tools guide for regex patterns, encoding helpers, and more.