Grinning Cat With Smiling Eyes Emoji

A yellow cat face with a big open grin and crescent-shaped smiling eyes. The cat is so happy its eyes have squeezed shut. It's the feline version of 😄, same emotion, different species, and the species choice changes everything.

Why does this emoji exist? Because in 2003, a Japanese phone company called au by KDDI added cat face expressions to their proprietary emoji set. When Unicode standardized emoji for global use in 2010, they preserved KDDI's cats for compatibility. That's why there are nine cat face emoji (😺😸😹😻😼😽🙀😿😾) forming a complete emotional range, while dogs got exactly one face (🐶). Cats' emoji privilege traces to one product decision at one company.

But it's not arbitrary. Japan has a centuries-old cat reverence that runs from the maneki-neko (lucky cat) figurines at shop entrances to cat island pilgrimages to the world's first cat cafes. Cats are the "unofficial mascot of the Internet", and the emoji keyboard was built in Japan. The nine cat faces aren't a glitch. They're a reflection of which culture designed the system.

😸 specifically is the "blissful" cat. Emojipedia describes it as expressing "happiness, affection, or playfulness, especially when referring to cats or other cute animals." In the cat face emotional spectrum, 😺 is happy (eyes open), 😸 is beaming (eyes closed from smiling), 😹 is laughing, and 😻 is in love. 😸 is the satisfied cat in a sunbeam.

There are two types of people who use 😸, and both think they're the only type.

The first group: cat people. They use cat face emoji instead of human face emoji as a personality statement. Where a normal person sends 😄, a cat person sends 😸. Where they'd use 😢, they reach for 😿. The entire nine-emoji cat set functions as a parallel emotional keyboard. Urban Dictionary's definition of cat emoji users captures this: people who "prefer the feline versions because they feel more expressive."

The second group: people expressing satisfaction with a hint of smugness. 😸 carries a Cheshire Cat energy that 😄 doesn't. The squinting eyes and wide grin suggest the cat got the cream. "Just got the last concert ticket 😸" hits different from "Just got the last concert ticket 😄" because the cat version adds a self-pleased quality. You're not just happy. You're cat-happy. Smug. Cozy. Pleased with yourself.

On TikTok, cat emoji show up in pet content comments (obvious) but also in a specific meme format where people caption their own victories or petty moments with cat faces rather than human ones. The cat emoji adds a layer of playful detachment: you're amused, but in the way a cat watching a mouse would be amused.

In dating, Mamamia's dating emoji guide warned "Don't EVER use cat emojis" in 2020, arguing they read as eccentric. That advice aged poorly. Cat emoji are now coded as personality markers, and for certain people, 😸 from a date is a green flag meaning "this person has a sense of humor and doesn't take themselves too seriously."

The story of 😸 starts with a ceramic figurine from the Edo period.

The maneki-neko (招き猫), Japan's beckoning lucky cat, traces to at least the 1620s. The most popular origin story involves feudal lord Ii Naotaka, who was beckoned into Gōtoku-ji Temple by a cat waving at the gate. A violent thunderstorm struck moments after he took shelter, and he credited the cat with saving his life. The temple became associated with good fortune, and ceramic cats with raised paws became fixtures in Japanese shops, restaurants, and homes. Today you'll find them at the entrance of businesses from Tokyo ramen shops to Brooklyn bodegas.

That cultural reverence for cats fed directly into digital communication. When au by KDDI built their proprietary emoji set for Japanese phones in 2003, they included cat face expressions with animations. Not dog faces. Not rabbit faces. Cats. Emojipedia confirmed: "These emojis were added to Unicode for compatibility with Japanese phone company 'au' which added them to their proprietary emoji set in 2003."

When Unicode standardized emoji in 2010, they absorbed KDDI's cat set to maintain backward compatibility. That gave cats nine dedicated face emoji (😺😸😹😻😼😽🙀😿😾) covering the full emotional spectrum from joy to rage. No other animal comes close. Dogs have one face (🐶). Monkeys have three (🙈🙉🙊, but those are hear/see/speak-no-evil, not emotions). Cats alone got a parallel emotional keyboard.

Meanwhile, cats were conquering the internet independently. Harry Pointer created Brighton Cats in the 1870s, some of the earliest captioned cat photos in history. LOLcats emerged on 4chan in 2005. I Can Has Cheezburger launched in 2007, receiving 500 submissions daily by June. Keyboard Cat (filmed in 1984, viral in 2007), Nyan Cat (2011), Grumpy Cat (2012). By the time most people discovered the cat emoji set, cats had already been ruling the internet for a decade. The emoji just made it official.

1. 1620Maneki-neko (lucky cat) folklore begins at Gōtoku-ji Temple, Japan↗
2. 2003au by KDDI adds cat face emoji to their proprietary Japanese phone set↗
3. 2010Unicode 6.0 absorbs KDDI's cat faces for backward compatibility↗
4. 2015Added to Emoji 1.0, available on all major platforms

Japan's relationship with cats is fundamentally different from the West's.

In Japan, cats carry centuries of cultural weight. Maneki-neko figurines invite prosperity. Cat islands (Aoshima, Tashirojima) are tourist destinations. Cat cafes originated in Osaka in 2004 before spreading globally. Even Japanese train stations have had cat stationmasters (Tama, the calico cat at Kishi Station, boosted local tourism revenue by ¥1.1 billion). In this context, 😸 carries a warmth and reverence that goes beyond "cute animal."

In the West, cat emoji map more directly to internet cat culture: memes, viral videos, and the personality of being a "cat person" vs "dog person." The academic research backs this up: Indiana University's Jessica Myrick surveyed nearly 7,000 people and found that watching cat videos boosts energy and positive emotions. There were over 2 million cat videos on YouTube in 2014 alone, with 26 billion views and more views per video than any other category.

In Egyptian cultural memory, cats were sacred animals associated with the goddess Bastet. Killing a cat, even accidentally, was punishable by death. While modern Egyptians don't worship cats, the historical reverence gives cat imagery, including 😸, an extra layer of cultural depth in the region.

• •The nine cat face emoji exist because of one product decision at one company: au by KDDI added cat expressions to their Japanese phone emoji in 2003. Unicode preserved them for compatibility in 2010. Dogs, rabbits, and lions were never given the same treatment.
• •Grumpy Cat generated approximately $100 million in revenue including a movie, a New York Times bestselling book, a coffee line, and a Friskies spokescat deal. She died in May 2019 at age 7.
• •Nyan Cat sold as an NFT for 300 ETH ($590,000) in February 2021. The price jumped from 3 ETH to 300 ETH in the final 30 minutes of bidding.
• •Harry Pointer's Brighton Cats (1870s) are the earliest known captioned cat photos. Cat memes predate the internet by over 130 years.
• •Jessica Myrick at Indiana University surveyed nearly 7,000 people and found cat videos boost energy and positive emotions. In 2014, YouTube hosted 2 million cat videos with 26 billion views, more views per video than any other category.
• •The maneki-neko (lucky cat) traces to 1620s Japan. A cat at Gōtoku-ji Temple allegedly beckoned a feudal lord to shelter moments before a thunderstorm, saving his life. Four centuries later, those ceramic cats are everywhere, and their descendants live on your emoji keyboard.
• •The phrase "grinning like a Cheshire cat" predates Lewis Carroll's 1865 Alice in Wonderland. Carroll may have been inspired by a 16th-century sandstone carving near his birthplace.

• •Using cat emoji in dating can read as eccentric to people who aren't cat-emoji-native. A 2020 dating guide warned "don't EVER use cat emojis" for this reason. The advice is outdated, but the perception exists among some people.
• •😸 can accidentally read as smug or self-satisfied in contexts where you should be humble. "I got the promotion everyone wanted 😸" might rub coworkers the wrong way because the cat grin carries a hint of "and I'm pleased about that."
• •Some people use all the cat faces interchangeably without distinguishing between 😸 (blissful), 😺 (happy), 😻 (love), and 😼 (sarcastic). If precision matters to your recipient, pick the right cat.

• •Lewis Carroll's Cheshire Cat from Alice's Adventures in Wonderland (1865) is literature's most famous grinning cat. The character periodically disappears, leaving only its iconic grin visible. The phrase "grinning like a Cheshire cat" predates the book, and Carroll may have been inspired by a 16th-century sandstone carving of a grinning cat at St Wilfrid's Church, five miles from his birthplace. 😸 carries that same energy: a grin that exists independently of context.
• •Grumpy Cat (Tardar Sauce), born 2012, became the internet's most commercially successful cat meme, generating an estimated $100 million in revenue including a movie, a New York Times bestselling book, a coffee line ("Grumpuccino"), and a Friskies spokescat deal. She was Grumpy Cat. ���� is her exact opposite: the internet's most optimistic cat face. She died in May 2019 at age 7.
• •Nyan Cat (2011), the animated Pop-Tart cat flying through space leaving a rainbow, ranked #5 on YouTube's most viewed videos list in 2011. In February 2021, creator Chris Torres sold a remastered version as an NFT for 300 ETH ($590,000), one of the earliest major meme NFT sales. The price shot up from 3 ETH to 300 ETH in the final 30 minutes of bidding.
• •LOLcats originated on 4chan in 2005 through the weekly "Caturday" ritual. I Can Has Cheezburger launched in 2007 and was receiving 500 submissions per day within months. By June 2007, a Google search for "lolcat" returned 3.3 million results. The grammar-mangling captioned cat photo format established cats as the internet's default humor vehicle.
• •Harry Pointer's Brighton Cats (1870s) are among the earliest known captioned cat photos. A Victorian-era British photographer staging cats in funny poses with text captions was doing LOLcats 130 years before 4chan. Cat memes didn't start with the internet. The internet just scaled them.
• •Jessica Myrick's Indiana University study (2015) surveyed nearly 7,000 people and found that watching cat videos boosts energy and positive emotions while decreasing negative feelings. With 26 billion views on 2 million YouTube cat videos in 2014, cat content had more views per video than any other YouTube category. Cat emoji extend that mood-boost effect into text conversations.
• •The maneki-neko (lucky cat) figurine traces to 1620s Japan, when a cat at Gōtoku-ji Temple allegedly beckoned feudal lord Ii Naotaka to shelter moments before a thunderstorm. Four centuries later, ceramic lucky cats sit at the entrance of businesses worldwide. The cats on your emoji keyboard are, in a roundabout way, descendants of that same cultural instinct.

• •😸 is U+1F638U+1F638 GRINNING CAT FACE WITH SMILING EYES. Part of Unicode 6.0 (2010), Emoji 1.0 (2015). Shortcodes: :smile_cat::smile_cat: on Slack, GitHub, and Discord.
• •Does not support skin tone modifiers (cat faces never do). The cat face set spans U+1F63AU+1F63A through U+1F63EU+1F63E, plus U+1F638U+1F638 and U+1F639U+1F639. If building emoji pickers, group the nine cat faces together as a subset of Smileys & Emotion.
• •Some analytics tools classify cat face emoji separately from human face emoji in sentiment analysis. If your app does sentiment detection, treat 😸 as equivalent to 😄 (positive) rather than flagging it as an animal emoji.

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