Kissing Cat Emoji

A cat face with closed eyes, rosy cheeks, and puckered lips, as if planting a gentle kiss. 😽 is the feline version of 😚, and that distinction matters more than you'd think. Choosing a cat face over a human face to express affection changes the tone entirely.

Cute affection. 😽 says "I love you" but with its tongue firmly in its cheek (or its whiskers twitching). It's lighter than 😘 and less intense than 😻. Where 😘 sends a kiss to a crush, 😽 sends a kiss to a friend, a pet, or a cute photo. The cat wrapper softens the intimacy.

Cat lover energy. A significant chunk of 😽 usage is literal: people texting about their cats, responding to cat photos, or signing off messages in cat-themed group chats. "My cat just fell asleep on my lap 😽" or "Look at this kitten 😽" use the emoji for what it looks like, not what it metaphorically means.

Quirky personality marker. Using cat face emojis instead of human face emojis is itself a personality signal. It says "I'm playful, I don't take myself too seriously, and I might have a cat aesthetic profile picture." Gen Z has leaned into this, using the full cat emoji set (😺😸😹😻😼😽😿😾🙀) as alternatives to their human counterparts for a more offbeat, less generic tone.

😽 was approved in Unicode 6.0 (2010) as U+1F63DU+1F63D KISSING CAT FACE WITH CLOSED EYES. It's part of the nine-emoji cat face set that traces its roots back to Japanese mobile carrier emoji sets from 2003, when au by KDDI first added cat faces to their proprietary emoji library.

😽 occupies a specific lane in digital communication: cute, affectionate, low-stakes. It's the emoji equivalent of a forehead kiss from a cat.

On Instagram and TikTok, 😽 appears most in pet content and cute aesthetic posts. Cat accounts use it in every caption. People sharing cat photos in DMs pair it with 😻 and 🐱 for maximum feline energy. The "cat emoji aesthetic" is a real niche on TikTok, where creators style their profiles and captions exclusively with cat emojis.

In friend group chats, 😽 works as a sign-off. "Good night 😽" or "Love you guys 😽" uses the cat face to keep the affection playful rather than heavy. It's friendlier than a bare ❤️ and less romantic than 😘. The closed eyes and puckered lips convey warmth without intensity.

Google Trends data tells the story of the cat face hierarchy. 😻 (heart eyes cat) dominates at 79-95, because "heart eyes" is an emotion everyone searches for. 😺 (grinning cat) sits middle at 29-58 as the default happy cat. 😽 trails at 12-33, because its meaning is clear enough that people don't need to look it up.

The cat emoji set has found a second life as an ironic/aesthetic choice. Emojipedia's blog documented Gen Z's "chaotic ironic emoji swapping" trend, where using unexpected emojis signals in-group membership. Cat faces fit perfectly into this: they're not the obvious choice, which is exactly the point.

😽 is 60% friendly, 40% potentially flirty. The cat face adds enough ambiguity that it works as both. A friend sending 😽 is being cute. A crush sending 😽 might be testing if you'll respond with something warmer. The difference is context and history: if you've been flirting, 😽 continues the flirtation. If you haven't, it's just a cat kiss.

• •From a friend: almost always platonic warmth
• •From a crush: cautious flirting hidden behind a cute cat face
• •From a partner: playful affection
• •The cat face gives plausible deniability: 'I was just being cute'

The cat face emoji set exists because of Japan. Cats hold deep cultural significance in Japanese society, from the maneki-neko (beckoning cat) statues that sit in shop windows to the ubiquitous cat cafes that dot Tokyo's streets. When Japanese mobile carriers created their first proprietary emoji sets in the late 1990s and early 2000s, cat faces were a natural inclusion. Au by KDDI added cat faces to their set in 2003, and SoftBank and DoCoMo followed.

When the Unicode Consortium standardized emoji in Unicode 6.0 (2010), they needed to maintain compatibility with these existing Japanese sets. The cat face emojis were carried over because thousands of Japanese users were already using them. This is also why there are nine cat face variations but only one dog face (🐶): the Japanese sets had invested in cat expressions while dogs got a single representation.

The SoftBank emoji designs heavily influenced Apple's original emoji font, which launched in Japan first. When emoji went global in 2011, the cat faces came along. Western users adopted them not because they had cultural significance but because they were there, and because a cat kissing face is inherently charming.

😽 specifically mirrors 😚 (Kissing Face with Closed Eyes) in cat form. The closed eyes and puckered lips are identical in purpose. The cat ears, whiskers, and triangular nose transform the same gesture from "I'm kissing you" to "I'm cutely kissing you." That single word, "cutely," is the entire difference between the human and cat versions.

Approved in Unicode 6.0 (2010) as U+1F63DU+1F63D KISSING CAT FACE WITH CLOSED EYES. Added to Emoji 1.0 in 2015. Part of the nine-emoji cat face set that includes 😺 (grinning), 😸 (grinning with eyes), 😹 (joy), 😻 (heart eyes), 😼 (wry), 😽 (kissing), 😿 (crying), 😾 (pouting), and 🙀 (weary). All nine were added in Unicode 6.0 as a batch.

In Japan, cat emojis carry cultural weight that Western users don't always feel. Cats are associated with good luck (maneki-neko), supernatural qualities (bakeneko, nekomata), and everyday cuteness (kawaii culture). Using 😽 in Japan can feel more culturally grounded than playful.

In Western texting culture, cat face emojis are almost always a style choice. Using 😽 instead of 😘 signals personality: you're the type of person who identifies with cats, who appreciates cute over cool, who might have a cat aesthetic Instagram theme. It's a subcultural marker rather than a cultural one.

On Korean messaging platforms like KakaoTalk, custom cat sticker sets largely replace the standard cat emojis. Korean users tend to use elaborate animated stickers for cat-themed affection rather than the flat Unicode 😽.

• •The entire nine-emoji cat face set (😺😸😹😻😼😽😿😾🙀) was added in Unicode 6.0 (2010) as a batch. They trace back to Japanese mobile carrier emoji sets from 2003, when au by KDDI first included cat faces in their proprietary library.
• •There are nine cat face emojis but only one dog face (🐶) in Unicode. This imbalance exists because the Japanese carriers that created the original emoji sets invested heavily in cat expressions, reflecting Japan's deep cultural connection to cats.
• •😻 (heart eyes cat) gets 3-4x more Google Trends search interest than 😽, peaking at 95 vs 😽's peak of 33. Love is more searchable than kisses in the cat emoji world.
• •The SoftBank emoji designs heavily influenced Apple's original emoji font, which launched in Japan first. When emoji went global in 2011, the cat faces came along. Western users adopted them because they were charming, not because they understood the cultural context.
• •Japan's maneki-neko (beckoning cat) statues have been symbols of good luck since the Edo period (1603-1868). The cultural reverence for cats is why they got nine emoji expressions while dogs got one.

• •😽 is U+1F63DU+1F63D. Unicode name: KISSING CAT FACE WITH CLOSED EYES. CLDR short name: "kissing cat." Common shortcodes: :kissing_cat::kissing_cat: (Slack, Discord, GitHub). Part of Unicode 6.0 (2010), Emoji 1.0 (2015).
• •For sentiment analysis: 😽 is positive (0.4-0.6 range). It's affectionate but mild. In cat content contexts, it's purely positive. In conversational contexts, it can carry subtle flirty undertones. Weight cat-face emojis differently from their human counterparts in your NLP pipeline.

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