Kissing Face With Closed Eyes Emoji

A yellow face with closed eyes, rosy cheeks, and puckered lips giving a kiss. This is the tender one. The closed eyes are what make 😚 different from every other kissing emoji. You close your eyes when you mean it.

There's actual science behind this. In 2016, researchers Sandra Murphy and Polly Dalton at Royal Holloway, University of London, published a study in the Journal of Experimental Psychology showing that visual processing competes with tactile sensitivity. When your brain is busy processing what your eyes see, it loses ability to process touch. We close our eyes while kissing because shutting out visual input leaves more mental resources to focus on the physical sensation. 😚 is the emoji that captures this: eyes closed because the kiss matters enough to feel fully.

😚 was part of Unicode 6.0 (2010), arriving alongside 😘 (the winking heart-blower). While 😘 became the go-to romantic kiss (70-92 on Google Trends), 😚 settled into a quieter role at 11-16. It's more intimate but less popular, which tracks: real intimacy is quieter than performative affection. 😘 blows a kiss to a crowd. 😚 kisses one person with its eyes closed.

😚 is the goodnight kiss emoji. The "thinking of you" kiss. The "I'm too shy to say I love you so here's a blushing kiss instead" emoji. The rosy cheeks add a layer of vulnerability that 😘 doesn't have. 😘 winks (confident, outgoing). 😚 blushes (tender, slightly nervous).

In practice, 😚 gets used most often between people who are already close: established couples, best friends, family members. It doesn't work well as a first move because it's too intimate. Sending 😚 to someone you just met is like going in for a kiss on the lips during a handshake. The closed eyes presuppose a level of trust that hasn't been established yet.

SweetyHigh notes an interesting gender difference: 😚 from a guy tends to read as a straightforward romantic smooch, while 😚 from a girl is more likely to be playful and friendly. This isn't universal, but it reflects a pattern where women use affectionate emojis more casually across relationships while men reserve them for romantic contexts.

The emoji also works as a sign-off. "Night 😚" is warmer than "Night 😗" and less performative than "Night 😘." The closed eyes give it a settling-in quality, like someone drifting off to sleep after a goodnight kiss.

Leans romantic. 😚 is more intimate than any other kissing emoji except 💋 (which is physically sexual). The closed eyes + rosy cheeks combination signals vulnerability and genuine feeling. It can be friendly between very close friends, but the default reading is romantic or deeply affectionate. If someone sends 😚 who doesn't usually use affectionate emojis, pay attention.

The four kissing faces in Unicode tell a story about what the standard's designers thought people wanted.

Unicode 6.0 (2010) included two kissing faces: 😘 (winking with a heart, confident and outgoing) and 😚 (closed eyes with rosy cheeks, tender and intimate). Both are romantic. Both presuppose a close relationship. The committee apparently assumed that if you're sending a kiss emoji, it's because you're in love.

Two years later, Unicode 6.1 (2012) added 😗 (open eyes, no extras) and 😙 (smiling eyes). These are the friendly, platonic kisses. The afterthoughts.

What makes 😚 specific is the combination of closed eyes AND rosy cheeks. The closed eyes reference the neuroscience of kissing: we close our eyes during a real kiss because our brains can't process both visual input and tactile sensation simultaneously. The rosy cheeks reference the physiological blush response, when blood rushes to the face during moments of emotional arousal. Together, they create a face that's physically experiencing the kiss, not just performing one.

😘 blows a kiss outward (it's projecting affection). 😚 absorbs a kiss inward (it's receiving or savoring affection). The difference between broadcasting love and feeling love.

Approved in Unicode 6.0 (2010) as U+1F61AU+1F61A KISSING FACE WITH CLOSED EYES. Added to Emoji 1.0 in 2015. Part of the original kissing batch alongside 😘 (U+1F618U+1F618). The plain 😗 and 😙 (smiling eyes) kissing faces arrived two years later in Unicode 6.1 (2012). This means the most intimate kissing face was standardized before the most casual one, suggesting the committee prioritized romance over friendliness.

Kiss emoji usage varies significantly by culture. A 2022 study in Intercultural Pragmatics found that Spanish WhatsApp users include kissing emojis in conversation closings far more frequently than German users. This mirrors physical greeting customs: cheek kissing is standard in Spain but less common in Germany.

The closed-eyes element of 😚 carries different weight in different cultures. In Japanese culture, where reading facial expressions through the eyes is emphasized, closed eyes in a kissing face signal deep trust and surrender. In Western culture, where the mouth carries more expressive weight, the puckered lips are the focal point. 😚 gives both cultures something to connect with.

In more conservative digital communication cultures (parts of East Asia, Middle East), any kissing emoji between non-family members can feel forward. 😚's closed eyes and blush make it the most intimate of the kissing faces, which means it's also the most likely to feel inappropriate in cultures with stricter norms around digital affection.

• •😚 was part of Unicode 6.0 (2010), arriving alongside 😘. The two most romantic kissing faces were standardized together, two years before the platonic ones (😗 and 😙).
• •A 2016 Royal Holloway study found that visual processing competes with tactile sensitivity. We close our eyes while kissing because our brains can't fully process both seeing and touching simultaneously. 😚 captures this neuroscience accidentally.
• •😚's rosy cheeks represent the involuntary blush response, when blood rushes to the face during emotional arousal. Unlike a smile (which can be faked), a blush is a genuine physiological signal. 😚 is the only kissing emoji with this marker of authenticity.
• •SweetyHigh reports a gender pattern: 😚 from a guy tends to read as a direct romantic gesture, while 😚 from a girl is more likely to be playful and friendly. The same emoji, different default interpretations.
• •😚 has a cat variant: 😽 Kissing Cat. Same closed-eye tender energy, feline packaging.
• •😚 cannot take a skin tone modifier. None of the kissing faces can. The Unicode Consortium classifies smiley faces as abstract cartoons rather than human depictions, so they stay permanently yellow. Only explicit people emojis (🧑, 👋, 🙋) accept tones.
• •In Spain, the kissing emoji accounts for 17.6% of all emoji usage, making it the country's #1 emoji. Worldwide, the #1 is typically 😂 or ❤️. Spain is the only major country where a kiss wins.
• •Korean has three different words for a kiss, and 😚 maps to the softest one. 키스 (kiseu) is the English-loan adult kiss, 뽀뽀 (ppoppo) is the cute peck, and 쪽 (jjok) is the onomatopoeia for the sound itself. Fans of K-pop idols pair 쪽 with 😚 in captions the way Western fans pair "muah" with 😘.
• •The 2022 Royal Holloway eye-closing study wasn't actually about kissing. It tested tactile acuity during a letter-search task. The "we close our eyes when we kiss" framing came from the press release. The underlying mechanism (visual-tactile interference) is real, but the kiss was the cover story.

• •Sending 😚 to someone who isn't that close to you can feel overly forward. The closed eyes presuppose a level of trust and intimacy that might not exist yet. What you mean as warm, they might read as too much too soon.
• •Some people use 😚 interchangeably with 😘, not realizing the difference in intensity. 😚 (closed eyes, blushing, private) carries more emotional weight than 😘 (winking, heart, outgoing). Swapping one for the other can shift the tone of a message.
• •In cultures where digital affection is more reserved, 😚 might feel inappropriate even between close friends. The combination of closed eyes and blush reads as romantic in most contexts, and context doesn't always override cultural norms.

• •😚 is U+1F61AU+1F61A. Unicode name: KISSING FACE WITH CLOSED EYES. Common shortcodes: :kissing_closed_eyes::kissing_closed_eyes: (Slack, Discord, GitHub). Part of Unicode 6.0 (2010), unlike 😗 and 😙 which are Unicode 6.1.
• •When building emoji sentiment analysis, 😚 should be weighted as strongly romantic/positive. It's the most intimate of the kissing faces and almost never used in non-affectionate contexts.

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