One of the internet's oldest emoji, the smiling face is a simple, closed-eyed grin descended straight from the original 1963 smiley design. Its plainness cuts both ways: in a friendly text it reads warm and easygoing, but tacked onto a clipped reply it can land as icy customer-service energy — younger texters especially tend to read it as passive-aggressive rather than happy.
What ☺️ means
The ☺️ Smiling Face emoji is a sweet and warm smile expression with a yellow face, a little blush on the cheeks, and a curved and relaxed smile (Apple has a weird way of not having color for this emoji). This emoji shows contentment, happiness, gratitude, appreciation, and a relaxed mood.
How and when to use it
- When you're responding to a compliment, the ☺️ Smiling Face along with a Thank You is the perfect response.
- You can also use this emoji when texting people you're not very close with, but want to have a cordial relationship - like distant family, friends, colleagues, etc.
- The ☺️ Smiling Face emoji is also a nice way to reply to rhetoric texts like 'Okay', 'No Problem' and 'Thnx'.
Other Names
- ☺️ Relaxed Face
- ☺️ Smile
- ☺️ Calm Face
- ☺️ Happy Face
The lowdown
- Category
- Smileys & Emotion › face-affection
- Codepoints
U+263A U+FE0F- Emoji version
- Emoji 0.6
- Shortcodes
:relaxed:GitHub- Keywords
- face, happy, outlined, relaxed, smile, smiling
How it looks across platforms
Seeing a blank box instead of the emoji somewhere? Here's why that happens. Curious why the designs above don't match to begin with? Here's why that happens too.
⚡ Quick round
Which joined the keyboard first — ☺️ Smiling Face or 🕦 Eleven-thirty?
Runs with a crowd
☺️ keeps company in happy emojis — tap-to-copy sets for when one emoji isn't enough.