Smiling Cat With Heart-eyes Emoji

😻 is 😍 in a cat suit. Heart-shaped eyes, open grin, pointed ears. The emotion is identical: love, adoration, being completely smitten. But the cat ears change the delivery. Where 😍 can read as earnestly romantic, 😻 adds a layer of playful distance that makes it easier to use casually.

There are two distinct camps of 😻 users. The first is cat people, literally. They send it under photos of their own cats, stray cats, Internet cats, and cats they spotted through a window. The second camp uses 😻 as a softer 😍, picking the cat version to compliment someone's outfit, a meal, or a sunset without the romantic weight. "Your hair 😻" hits differently than "Your hair 😍" because nobody thinks you're confessing your love via cartoon cat.

On Snapchat, 😻 has a completely separate system meaning. It appears next to a friend when you and that friend both send the most snaps to the same person. So if you see 😻 next to someone's name, it means you share a #1 best friend. This has nothing to do with admiration and confuses roughly everyone who notices it for the first time.

On Instagram and TikTok, 😻 shows up under pet content constantly. Cat photos, cat videos, cat rescue stories. It's the default react from the "cat people" corner of the internet, and they use it with zero irony.

Outside pet content, 😻 trends younger and more playful. It's popular in stan culture for reacting to idol photos ("the visuals 😻"), in group chats for casual compliments, and on Twitter/X as a lower-stakes version of 😍. The cat ears signal that you're being cute about your admiration, not intense.

One pattern worth noting: 74% of Gen Z use emojis differently than their intended meanings, and the cat emojis are a prime example. Some Gen Z users have started using the cat face set ironically, treating them as slightly unhinged alternatives to their human counterparts. 😻 under a cursed image is funnier than 😍 under the same image because the cat face adds absurdist energy.

😻 leans friendly, but the context swings it. Under a selfie from someone you're interested in, it's a soft flirt. Under a cat photo, it's just enthusiasm. The cat ears do the work of keeping it ambiguous, which is exactly why some people prefer it over the more obviously romantic 😍.

• •Flirty when sent as a reaction to someone's appearance
• •Friendly when sent under pet/animal content
• •Depends on your relationship: crush context makes it lean flirty, friend context keeps it casual
• •Triple 😻😻😻 amplifies whatever the context already suggests

The nine cat face emojis (😺😸😹😻😼😽🙀😿😾) exist because of one Japanese phone company's decision in 2003. Au by KDDI, one of Japan's three major carriers, added a set of animated cat face emojis to their proprietary Type D-1 emoji set. This wasn't random. Japan's relationship with cats runs centuries deep.

The maneki-neko (beckoning cat) figurine has been a fixture of Japanese shops since the Edo period (1615-1868). Legend says the feudal lord Ii Naotaka took shelter at Gōtoku-ji Temple in the 1620s after a cat at the gate beckoned him inside, moments before a violent thunderstorm struck. Cats entered Japanese literature as far back as the Nara period (710-794). By the 20th century, Hello Kitty (1974) had turned Japanese cat culture into a global export, and Tokyo's cat cafes became tourist attractions in a city where apartment sizes make pet ownership difficult.

So when au KDDI's designers needed to expand their emoji set, cat faces were obvious. As Emojipedia explained: "These emojis were added to Unicode for compatibility with Japanese phone company 'au' which added them to their proprietary emoji set in 2003." When the Unicode Consortium standardized emoji in 2010 (Unicode 6.0), the cat faces were preserved. Dogs got one face emoji (🐶). Cats got nine. The reason? Nobody at au KDDI in 2003 made nine dog faces, and Unicode was matching what already existed on Japanese phones, not designing from scratch.

1. 2003Au by KDDI adds animated cat face emoji set to Type D-1 proprietary emoji collection↗
2. 2010Encoded as U+1F63B SMILING CAT FACE WITH HEART-SHAPED EYES in Unicode 6.0↗
3. 2015Added to Emoji 1.0, becomes available on iOS and Android
4. 2017Name simplified to 'Smiling Cat with Heart-Eyes' in Emoji 5.0

In Japan, the cat emoji set resonates on a level that's hard to overstate. Between maneki-neko figurines in every shop, cat cafes across Tokyo, National Cat Day on February 22 (2/22, because "ni-ni-ni" sounds like "nyan-nyan-nyan," the Japanese onomatopoeia for meowing), and Hello Kitty's global domination, cats are woven into daily culture. Using 😻 in Japan feels less like picking a novelty emoji and more like using the natural option.

In Western markets, the cat emojis read more quirky. They're the "I'm not like other texters" choice. Using 😻 instead of 😍 signals a certain aesthetic sensibility or at minimum cat ownership. In K-pop fan culture globally, cat emojis get heavy use because many idols are compared to cats ("cat-like features" is a common fandom descriptor), making 😻 a natural react to bias photos.

• •Japan celebrates National Cat Day on February 22 (2/22) because "ni-ni-ni" sounds like "nyan-nyan-nyan," the Japanese word for meowing.
• •The crying cat meme (😿 with photoshopped tears) became one of the internet's most-used reaction images. The "Thumbs Up Crying Cat" variant was created on Reddit in June 2019 and hit r/dankmemes with 47,000+ upvotes in days.
• •Hello Kitty, created by Sanrio in 1974, helped turn Japan's cat obsession into a global soft power strategy. The same kawaii culture that produced Hello Kitty also shaped why Japanese phone carriers gave cats their own emoji set.
• •😻 was originally named "Smiling Cat Face with Heart-Shaped Eyes" in Unicode 6.0 (2010). It was shortened to just "Smiling Cat with Heart-Eyes" in Emoji 5.0 (2017), dropping both "Face" and "Shaped" from the name.
• •😻 is the most-used of the 9 cat face emoji, outpacing even 😺. The heart eyes give it a clear, unambiguous meaning (love/adoration) that the more generic cat faces lack. It functions as a cuter alternative to 😍 for anyone who likes cats.
• •On Snapchat, cat emoji serve as relationship indicators in the friend system. This system-level usage means 😻 appears in contexts where the user didn't choose it — it was assigned by an algorithm based on messaging frequency.

• •People sometimes use 😻 thinking it means the same thing as 😍 everywhere, but on Snapchat it's a relationship indicator emoji (shared #1 best friend), not an emotion.
• •Some recipients read 😻 as cat-specific and wonder why someone sent them a cat face. If you're not talking about cats, 😍 or 🥰 may land more clearly.

• •Crying cat memes (2014-present) — The Crying Cat (based on a photoshopped Serious Cat image from 2014) became one of the internet's most-used reaction formats. The Thumbs Up Crying Cat variant (June 2019) is now a staple sad-but-OK reaction. While these use 😿 specifically, they boosted the entire cat emoji set's cultural presence.
• •Hello Kitty and kawaii culture — Sanrio's Hello Kitty (1974) is the reason Japan's cat obsession went global. National Geographic traced how the character helped post-WWII Japan reinvent itself through soft power. The same kawaii aesthetic that made Hello Kitty a hit also influenced why au KDDI gave cats 9 emoji faces in 2003.
• •Emoji cat TikTok trend (2025) — TikTok saw a surge of "emoji cat" content in 2025, featuring animated cat characters based on emoji designs. The trend produced sticker packs, meme compilations, and original animation, bringing renewed attention to the cat emoji set.

• •Codepoint is U+1F63BU+1F63B. Shortcodes: :heart_eyes_cat::heart_eyes_cat: (Slack, Discord, GitHub).
• •Part of the cat face subgroup in Unicode's Smileys & Emotion category. All nine cat faces occupy U+1F63AU+1F63A through U+1F640U+1F640 (with 🙀 at the end of the range).
• •No skin tone modifiers. Unlike human face emojis, cat faces have no skin tone variants, which simplifies rendering.

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