Smiling Face With Smiling Eyes Emoji

A warm, closed smile with squinted happy eyes and rosy cheeks. It's the most universally safe positive emoji. No ambiguity, no hidden meaning, no generational baggage. When you send 😊, you're saying "I'm happy" or "that's nice" or "thank you" without any of the complications that come with more specific emojis. Google's Gboard data ranked it #5 globally on World Emoji Day, behind 😂, 😘, 😍, and ❤️. Part of its popularity comes from placement: on most emoji keyboards and platforms, 😊 sits near the top of the Smileys & Emotion category, making it one of the first faces you see when you open the picker. That positioning turns it into the default happy emoji for a lot of people who don't scroll further. The rosy cheeks give it a blushing quality that some people read as shy or bashful, but mostly it just reads as genuinely warm. It's the emoji equivalent of a real smile, the kind where your eyes crinkle.

You'll find 😊 everywhere because it fits everywhere. Instagram captions, work emails, texts to your mom, responses to compliments, sign-offs on messages. It's the go-to for people who want to add warmth without committing to a specific emotion. On Snapchat, 😊 has a special meaning: it appears next to contacts who are one of your Best Friends (you snap them a lot, but they're not your #1). This is a platform-specific use that has nothing to do with the emoji's normal meaning.

😊 leans friendly by default. The blushing cheeks can add a shy/bashful undertone in the right context, but most of the time it's straightforward warmth. If you're looking for a clear flirting signal, 😘 or 😍 are much stronger indicators. 😊 is the emoji you use when you want to be nice without sending a signal.

• •😊 after a compliment you gave them? They're pleased but playing it cool.
• •😊 as their go-to response emoji? It's just their texting style, don't read into it.
• •😊 combined with ❤️ or 😘? Now it's warmer. The 😊 softens the bolder emoji.
• •😊 from someone who usually sends 👍 or no emoji? That's a warmer-than-usual response from them. Context matters.

😊 entered Unicode through proposal L2/09-026 (dated 2009-01-30), the joint Google/Apple submission that brought 674 Japanese carrier emoji into UCS. The named authors were Markus Scherer, Mark Davis, Kat Momoi, and Darick Tong from Google plus Yasuo Kida and Peter Edberg from Apple. Their goal was practical, not artistic: NTT DoCoMo, KDDI, and SoftBank had already encoded smiley faces in carrier-specific Shift-JIS extensions, and Gmail/iPhone needed a way to display them across borders. So 😊 was approved as part of the Unicode 6.0 batch in 2010. The design, a closed smile with squinted happy eyes and pink/rosy cheeks, maps closely to the kaomoji tradition where eyes carry most of the emotional expression (compare to (◠‿◠) in text emoticons). The blushing cheeks were there in the earliest carrier glyphs and have become the defining feature that separates 😊 from the more neutral 🙂. While 🙂 has developed a reputation for being passive-aggressive (Forge/Medium called it "a tiny menace" in 2020), 😊 has stayed reliably positive.

Approved in Unicode 6.0 (2010) as U+1F60AU+1F60A SMILING FACE WITH SMILING EYES. Added to Emoji 1.0 in 2015. One of the original batch of standardized emoji from the Japanese carrier sets.

1. 2009Proposal L2/09-026 (Scherer, Davis, Momoi, Tong + Kida, Edberg) submits 😊 to Unicode as part of the 674-glyph carrier batch↗
2. 2010Unicode 6.0 standardizes it as U+1F60A SMILING FACE WITH SMILING EYES↗
3. 2011Apple ships 😊 in iOS 5 emoji keyboard
4. 2015Formalized in Emoji 1.0
5. 2017Google replaces blob-style 😊 with round face design
6. 2018Google ranks it #5 globally on Gboard for World Emoji Day↗

In the West, 😊 reads as straightforward warmth: happiness, friendliness, gratitude. In Japan, the same expression can serve a different function: maintaining politeness and decorum, sometimes even when the sender isn't particularly happy. Research on Eastern vs Western face-reading found that Japanese people read emotion primarily through the eyes, while Americans emphasize the mouth. Since 😊's eyes are the focal point (squinted, happy, with the smile secondary to the cheek blush), Japanese users engage with it differently — they read the closed eyes as polite composure, not just bubbling joy. In formal Japanese communication, 😊 can signal "I'm being appropriate" as much as "I'm delighted." In South Asian WhatsApp groups, 😊 functions as an all-purpose friendly sign-off, similar to how 🙏 works as a greeting. In Latin America, it sits behind more expressive emojis like 😍 and 😂 in popularity — the culture favors bigger emotional displays.

• 📝
  2017: Glikson et al., 'less competent': [Ella Glikson and colleagues, 'Smiling Smileys are Not That Competent' (Social Psychological and Personality Science, 2017)](https://journals.sagepub.com/doi/10.1177/1948550617720269), ran three studies finding that 😊 in workplace email made the sender seem less competent (though equally warm) to recipients. The effect was strongest for first-time professional contacts. The study was widely covered (Atlantic, Forbes, BBC) and made many companies cautious about smileys in business email.
• 🔄
  2020-2022: Gen Z flips the script: Slate's 2020 piece '[The Slack Smiley Face That Drives Me Up the Wall](https://slate.com/technology/2020/05/this-slack-smiley-face-yikes.html)' kicked off a public reframing where 🙂 (the flat one) became the passive-aggressive emoji, leaving 😊 (the warm blushing one) as the trusted default. The cheek blush, previously seen as juvenile, became the visible signifier of 'this person actually means it.'
• 📊
  2025: 88% Gen Z work approval: By [Atlassian's 2025 workforce survey](https://www.chanty.com/blog/emoji-statistics/), 88% of Gen Z workers said emoji help convey tone in workplace messages, with 😊 the most-cited safe choice. The Glikson finding still applies to first-time professional contacts (where any emoji can read as casual), but the within-team norm flipped completely in eight years.
• 🏰
  Why the cheeks won: Across vendor designs (Apple, Google, Samsung, Microsoft), 😊 is the only base smiley with rosy cheeks. The blush is the only physical signal in the emoji that can’t be performed sarcastically (you can fake a smile, you can’t fake a blush). That asymmetry is the visual mechanism behind 😊's trust premium: the cheeks pre-commit the sender to sincerity in a way 🙂 and ☺️ don’t.

• •Google's Gboard data ranked 😊 as the #5 most-used emoji globally on World Emoji Day, behind 😂, 😘, 😍, and ❤️.
• •On Snapchat, 😊 is a system indicator meaning someone is one of your Best Friends, a completely different use case from its normal meaning.
• •The rosy cheeks on 😊 are what distinguish it from 🙂 (slightly smiling face). Those cheeks are why 😊 reads as sincere while 🙂 has become infamous for passive aggression.
• •😊 maps to the Japanese kaomoji tradition where eyes, not mouths, carry emotional meaning. The squinted, happy eyes are the key feature, similar to (◠‿◠).
• •On most emoji keyboards (iPhone, Samsung, Gboard) and platforms, 😊 sits near the top of the Smileys & Emotion category. That prime positioning makes it a default choice for people who don't scroll far, which partly explains its high usage.
• •Proposal L2/09-026 (2009-01-30) is the document that brought 😊 into Unicode. Authors: Markus Scherer, Mark Davis, Kat Momoi, Darick Tong (Google), Yasuo Kida, Peter Edberg (Apple). The submission covered 674 carrier glyphs at once, which is why 😊's encoding history is shared with hundreds of siblings rather than being a solo design decision.
• •Snapchat's friend emoji system turned 😊 into relationship metadata. When you see 😊 next to a friend's name, it means you send them a lot of Snaps but they're not your #1 Best Friend. The hierarchy goes: 😊 (Best Friend) → 💛 (Besties, mutual #1) → ❤️ (BFF, mutual #1 for 2 weeks) → 💕 (Super BFF, mutual #1 for 2 months). An emoji that means "warmth" everywhere else means "you're close but not #1" on Snapchat.

• •Some people read the rosy cheeks as embarrassment or shyness rather than warmth. In most contexts it's happiness, but after a compliment it can carry a bashful undertone.
• •At small screen sizes, 😊 and 🙂 can look similar. The difference matters: 😊 is warm (squinted eyes, rosy cheeks), 🙂 can read as cold or sarcastic (open eyes, no blush). Picking the wrong one changes the entire tone of your message.

• •The ":)" text emoticon is 😊's direct ancestor, one of the two original emoticons proposed by Scott Fahlman in 1982 on a Carnegie Mellon bulletin board. 😊 (with blushing cheeks) became the warmer, friendlier evolution of the basic smiley.
• •😊 is the most commonly used emoji in Japanese LINE messaging, reflecting its origin in Japanese mobile carrier emoji sets where smiling faces with closed eyes represented polite warmth rather than Western-style enthusiasm.
• •Scott Fahlman's :-) posted on September 19, 1982 on a Carnegie Mellon bulletin board is 😊's direct ancestor. Fahlman proposed using :-) to mark jokes and :-( to mark serious posts, because online conversations kept going sideways without tone markers. The idea spread across ARPANET before "going viral" was a concept. The Guinness Book of World Records credits it as the birth of the digital emoticon.
• •Slack and Duolingo surveyed 9,400 hybrid workers and found that 14% of respondents use the smiley face emoji (🙂) to express "deep exasperation and/or distrust." That number is why 😊 exists in a different lane: the rosy cheeks immunize it from the passive-aggressive reading that has consumed 🙂. Nobody sends 😊 sarcastically.
• •A 2017 Ben-Gurion University study found that smileys in work emails made the sender seem less competent without making them seem friendlier. Separately, University of Amsterdam researchers confirmed: emojis at work increase warmth perceptions but decrease competence perceptions. 😊 is caught in this trade-off — it makes you seem nicer but not smarter.

• •U+1F60AU+1F60A. One of the original Unicode 6.0 (2010) emoji. No variation selector needed.
• •On Slack: :blush::blush:. On GitHub: :blush::blush:. The shortcode is "blush" not "smile" because of the rosy cheeks. Don't confuse with :smile::smile: which maps to 😄.
• •Snapchat uses 😊 as a friend indicator emoji. If you're building Snapchat integrations, be aware this codepoint has platform-specific semantic meaning beyond its Unicode definition.

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