Smiling Face Emoji
An older, softer smiley with no outline, quieter than the yellow faces around it.
Try Smiling Face emoji
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Meaning & usage
What does the Smiling Face emoji mean?
An older, softer smiley with no outline, quieter than the yellow faces around it.
Quiet and slightly old-fashioned. It predates most of the yellow faces and is often read as an older person's smile, which some senders lean into deliberately.
How to use ☺️ naturally
Gentle warmth in messages, and common among users who have been online a long time.
Face emoji usually carry more tone than literal information. Read them alongside the words, the relationship between the people, and whether the conversation is playful, formal or tense.
From standard to slang
The history of ☺️
- 2010
First defined as emoji
According to Unicode’s Emoji Versions data, Smiling Face was first defined as emoji in Emoji 0.6, dated 2010. That label is retrospective: Unicode applied it later to the early mobile core it inherited from the Japanese carriers.
- Before the keyboard
Its visual roots
One of the oldest characters here, a plain outlined smiley that existed as a text dingbat long before emoji. It still defaults to monochrome without a variation selector.
- Today
How its use evolved
Gentle warmth in messages, and common among users who have been online a long time.
Dates follow Unicode’s official Emoji Versions chart. Versions before Emoji 1.0 are labelled retrospectively. See the history of emoji.
In conversation
Examples of ☺️ in messages
These examples show the emoji in complete messages, where the words make its intended tone easier to read.
That's very kind of you ☺️
Lovely afternoon, thank you ☺️
Looking forward to it ☺️
When to use it
Using ☺️ clearly
Gentle warmth in messages, and common among users who have been online a long time. It lands as smiling face emoji or ☺️ meaning when the rest of the message supports that reading, and it is the surrounding words that do the deciding — so in a sensitive, professional or cross-cultural conversation, say the thing outright as well.
Common questions
About the smiling face emoji
What does ☺️ mean in a text message?
An older, softer smiley with no outline, quieter than the yellow faces around it. Quiet and slightly old-fashioned. It predates most of the yellow faces and is often read as an older person's smile, which some senders lean into deliberately.
Is ☺️ always positive?
Not always. Its usual readings are smiling face emoji, ☺️ meaning, white smiling face, and irony or the relationship between the people can flip any of them.
Why does ☺️ look different on another device?
U+263A U+FE0F identifies the emoji; the picture is a font, drawn separately by Apple, Google, Microsoft and Samsung. Only the artwork changes, never the character.
How do I copy and paste the smiling face emoji?
Use the copy button at the top of this page. ☺️ is a character, not an image, so it pastes into messages, captions and filenames as ordinary text.
When was the smiling face emoji introduced?
Unicode’s Emoji Versions data first records ☺️ as emoji in Emoji 0.6, dated 2010. Early emoji version numbers can be retrospective, so this date describes its place in the standardised emoji set rather than the first-ever appearance of the underlying symbol.
For developers
☺️ in code
Every value below is generated from the character itself, so it stays correct even where a file encoding cannot hold the emoji directly.
| Format | Value | When to use it | Copy |
|---|---|---|---|
| Unicode | U+263A U+FE0F | The standard reference. Use it to search a character map or a spec. | |
| HTML (hex) | ☺️ | For HTML and XML. Safe in files that are not saved as UTF-8. | |
| HTML (decimal) | ☺️ | The same reference in decimal. Both render identically. | |
| CSS | \263A \FE0F | For the content property. Keep the quotes around the whole value. | |
| JavaScript | \u{263A}\u{FE0F} | A string-literal escape. Needs the u flag inside a regular expression. | |
| URL-encoded | %E2%98%BA%EF%B8%8F | Percent-encoded UTF-8, for query strings and API requests. |
Reference card
Emoji details
- Unicode
- U+263A U+FE0F
- Category
- Smileys & Emotion
- Also known as
- smiling face emoji☺️ meaningwhite smiling face
Put it in a message
When ☺️ is the right choice
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