Smiling Face with Tear Emoji
A smile held in place over sadness — gratitude, bittersweetness or coping with good grace.
Try Smiling Face with Tear emoji
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Meaning & usage
What does the Smiling Face with Tear emoji mean?
A smile held in place over sadness — gratitude, bittersweetness or coping with good grace.
Gentle and bittersweet. It holds happiness and sadness at once, which makes it well suited to goodbyes and to gratitude that comes with a little grief.
How to use 🥲 naturally
Goodbyes, proud moments tinged with loss and hard days you are choosing to laugh about.
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 🥲
- 2020
First defined as emoji
According to Unicode’s Emoji Versions data, Smiling Face with Tear was first defined as emoji in Emoji 13.0, dated 2020. A full release across faces, animals, food and objects.
- Before the keyboard
Its visual roots
A smile with a single tear at one eye, drawn to hold two feelings at once. Added in 2020, when a lot of people needed exactly that.
- Today
How its use evolved
Goodbyes, proud moments tinged with loss and hard days you are choosing to laugh about.
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.
Last day at the office after nine years 🥲
She finally got the callback 🥲
Rough week but we made it 🥲
When to use it
Using 🥲 clearly
Goodbyes, proud moments tinged with loss and hard days you are choosing to laugh about. It lands as smiling face with tear or bittersweet emoji 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 with tear emoji
What does 🥲 mean in a text message?
A smile held in place over sadness — gratitude, bittersweetness or coping with good grace. Gentle and bittersweet. It holds happiness and sadness at once, which makes it well suited to goodbyes and to gratitude that comes with a little grief.
Is 🥲 always positive?
Not always. Its usual readings are smiling face with tear, bittersweet emoji, happy sad emoji, and irony or the relationship between the people can flip any of them.
Why does 🥲 look different on another device?
U+1F972 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 with tear 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 with tear emoji introduced?
Unicode’s Emoji Versions data first records 🥲 as emoji in Emoji 13.0, dated 2020. 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.
Easily confused
🥲 compared with similar emoji
These sit close enough in meaning that people reach for the wrong one. Here is what actually separates them.
Smiling Face with Tear or Pleading Face?
🥺 wants something from you; 🥲 wants nothing and is simply holding two feelings at once.
Smiling Face with Tear or Loudly Crying Face?
😭 is unrestrained. 🥲 is the smile held deliberately in place over the sadness.
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+1F972 | 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 | \1F972 | For the content property. Keep the quotes around the whole value. | |
| JavaScript | \u{1F972} | A string-literal escape. Needs the u flag inside a regular expression. | |
| URL-encoded | %F0%9F%A5%B2 | Percent-encoded UTF-8, for query strings and API requests. |
Reference card
Emoji details
- Unicode
- U+1F972
- Category
- Smileys & Emotion
- Also known as
- smiling face with tearbittersweet emojihappy sad emoji
Put it in a message
When 🥲 is the right choice
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