Kissing Face With Smiling Eyes Emoji

A yellow face with smiling eyes and puckered lips giving a kiss. The smiling eyes make this the fond, happy kiss: you're kissing someone you like, and the smile in your eyes proves it. Emojipedia describes 😙 as "fonder than 😗 but less intimate than 😚." It's the Goldilocks kiss: warm enough to feel personal, casual enough to feel safe.

😙 arrived in Unicode 6.1 (2012), two years after the romantic pair (😘 and 😚) shipped in Unicode 6.0 (2010). Just like 😗, it was a latecomer filling the gap between romantic and neutral. But where 😗 went fully neutral (open eyes, no warmth), 😙 added smiling eyes to show genuine fondness.

Here's the quiet paradox: 😙 is simultaneously the least-searched and the most-positive kiss emoji. The CLARIN Emoji Sentiment Ranking, built from 83 annotators labeling 1.6M multilingual tweets, scores 😙 at +0.778 with only 2.1% negative uses, the lowest negativity of any kissing face. 😘 scores +0.701 with 5.3% negative. 😗 scores +0.611 with 11.1% negative, because it gets dragged into sarcasm and whistling-past-the-scene memes. 😙 doesn't. The smiling eyes filter out the bad-faith contexts. Put another way: picking 😙 is the safest bet in the entire kissing-face family. It's also the rarest pick. The warmest kiss and the skipped kiss are the same kiss.

😙 is the grandparent kiss, the best-friend kiss, the "love you, bye" to a sibling. The smiling eyes give it genuine warmth without romantic intensity. It's the kiss you'd give a friend's kid on the forehead or your mom when you leave for the airport.

Like 😗, 😙 can also read as whistling, especially paired with 🎵. But the smiling eyes make the whistling interpretation less natural. You don't typically smile contentedly while whistling past a crime scene. The smiling eyes anchor 😙 more firmly in the affection camp than 😗.

One place 😙 shows up regularly: messages between older relatives. Grandparents, aunts, and uncles who use emoji tend to gravitate toward 😙 because the smiling eyes feel right and the puckered lips aren't as loaded as 😘's heart. It's the emoji equivalent of a family photo where everyone is genuinely happy to be there.

Mostly friendly. 😙 occupies the space between platonic fondness and mild romantic warmth. The smiling eyes signal genuine happiness, not attraction. For actual flirting, people use 😘 (which has the wink) or 😏 (which has the smirk). 😙 is the kiss you give because you care, not because you want something.

The kissing face family tells a story about how Unicode's designers thought about affection.

In 2010, they gave us two kissing faces: 😘 (confident, outgoing, heart-sending) and 😚 (intimate, blushing, eyes-closed). Both are romantic. Both assume the kiss means love.

Two years later, they realized friendships and family also involve kisses. 😗 arrived as the neutral option (open eyes, no extras). 😙 arrived as the fond option (smiling eyes, genuine warmth). Together, they completed a spectrum:

😗 → 😙 → 😚 → 😘 (neutral → fond → intimate → performative)

😙's smiling eyes are the key differentiator. In the same way that 😄's smiling eyes make it the warmest grinning face, 😙's smiling eyes make it the warmest casual kissing face. The eyes don't just see, they feel. Japanese kaomoji culture recognized this centuries before emoji: (^3^) uses the ^ character for happy eyes combined with 3 for puckered lips, the exact combination 😙 depicts.

Approved in Unicode 6.1 (2012) as U+1F619U+1F619 KISSING FACE WITH SMILING EYES. Added to Emoji 1.0 in 2015. Arrived alongside 😗 (U+1F617U+1F617), two years after the romantic kissing pair (😘 and 😚) in Unicode 6.0 (2010). The four kissing faces span two Unicode versions: romantic first (6.0), friendly second (6.1).

😙's fondness is universal, but the contexts where it's appropriate vary. In Mediterranean cultures where cheek kisses are standard greetings, 😙's warm-but-casual energy makes it a natural digital greeting. In cultures where kissing is reserved for close relationships, even the friendly 😙 can feel forward between acquaintances.

The smiling eyes give 😙 more clearly positive intent across cultures. Where 😗 can feel ambiguous (is it a kiss? is it a whistle? is it insincere?), 😙's visible happiness makes the affection obvious. It's harder to misread smiling eyes as sarcasm.

• •😙 arrived in Unicode 6.1 (2012) alongside 😗, two years after the romantic pair (😘 and 😚) in Unicode 6.0. The friendly kisses were an afterthought.
• •😙 is the least searched kissing emoji: 7-10 on Google Trends, below 😗 (8-14), 😚 (11-15), and far below 😘 (74-96). The fondest casual kiss is the rarest choice.
• •The kaomoji equivalent of 😙 is (^3^): happy eyes (^) + puckered lips (3). Japanese text culture figured out the smiling-eyes-kiss combination before emoji standardized it.
• •The kissing face spectrum from neutral to intimate: 😗 → 😙 → 😚 → 😘. Each step adds a layer of emotional investment. 😙 adds fondness but stops short of vulnerability. Compare them all on LetsEmoji.
• •The four kissing faces span two Unicode versions: 😘 and 😚 are Unicode 6.0 (2010), while 😗 and ��� are Unicode 6.1 (2012). The romantic kisses came first; the friendly, casual ones were added two years later as a "filler" to complete the set.
• •😙 is one of the most commonly confused emojis in user studies. At typical phone display sizes (16-24px), the difference between 😙's smiling eyes and 😗's neutral eyes is nearly invisible. Multiple UX researchers have argued that Unicode created more kissing variations than humans can visually distinguish on screen.
• •Of the four kissing faces, 😙 has the lowest negative-use rate in the CLARIN Emoji Sentiment Ranking: just 2.1% of real tweet uses are labeled negative, versus 11.1% for 😗. Add smiling eyes to the same lips and the sarcasm reading drops by 5x. It's the biggest sentiment swing across any pair of visually-similar emoji in the dataset.
• •The 😙 glyph was shipped as part of proposal L2/10-142, the emoji background document that pushed the remaining KDDI/SoftBank carrier pictographs into Unicode. It wasn't designed from scratch, it was imported from a Japanese mobile-carrier glyph that already existed as a companion to the puckered-lips kiss.
• •😙 maps directly onto the Japanese kaomoji (^3^)(^3^), where ^^ means squinted happy eyes and 33 means puckered lips. emoji2vec, a 2016 paper that trained vector embeddings for every Unicode emoji, places 😙 in the same semantic neighborhood as 😚, 😘, 💋, and 😽, with 😗 the single nearest neighbor. The machine-learned grouping matches the human-drawn spectrum almost perfectly.
• •The Herring and Dainas (2018) study on emoji, gender and age found that frequent use of the "kissyface" category of emoji positively predicted the 18-24 age group, not the grandparent demographic most people assume. Gen Z stan Twitter does more digital pecking than your aunt does, by volume.

• •At small sizes, 😙 and 😗 look nearly identical. The difference is in the eyes (smiling vs neutral), but that distinction shrinks to nothing on a phone screen. If you send 😙 expecting the recipient to notice the fondness in the eyes, they might just see a generic kissing face.
• •Like 😗, 😙 can be read as whistling. But the smiling eyes make this interpretation less likely. Whistling is usually casual or mischievous, and smiling eyes add a layer of genuine happiness that doesn't quite fit the "nothing to see here" whistle.

• •😙 is U+1F619U+1F619. Unicode name: KISSING FACE WITH SMILING EYES. Common shortcodes: :kissing_smiling_eyes::kissing_smiling_eyes: (Slack, Discord, GitHub). Part of Unicode 6.1 (2012), NOT 6.0.
• •For emoji pickers, consider whether all four kissing faces (😗😙😚😘) need to be displayed separately. User testing suggests most people can't distinguish 😗 and 😙 at typical display sizes. Collapsing them under a single "kiss" category with a long-press selector would reduce decision fatigue.

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