Smiley Face Symbols

The three text faces ☺ ☻ ☹ take your own colour and size, which no emoji face does. Use ☺ where the look must stay predictable — a username, a document — and 🙂 or 🙃 in a message, where the face carries the tone.

Copy and Paste Smiley Face Symbols

Three of these are not emoji at all. ☺ ☻ ☹ are ordinary text characters that take your font, your colour and your size — they were in computer character sets decades before emoji existed. Everything else on the page is an emoji face, drawn by your device in colour at a fixed size. That difference decides which one you actually want.

What Are Smiley Face Symbols?

☺ U+263A White Smiling Face and ☻ U+263B Black Smiling Face are the originals. They come from the very first IBM PC character set in 1981, where they occupied the first two positions, and they were drawn as line art because there was no colour to draw with. ☹ U+2639 is the frowning counterpart, added later.

The emoji faces arrived from a completely different direction: Japanese mobile phones in the late 1990s, brought into Unicode from 2010 onward. They live from U+1F600 upward, and the newest of them — 🫠 🫡 🫢 🫥 🫨 — were added within the last few years. That is why ☺ looks like a printed mark and 🙂 looks like a cartoon: forty years separate them.

How to Use Smiley Face Symbols

Text Smiley Face Symbols Versus Emoji

☺ behaves like a letter. It inherits the colour of the surrounding text, scales with the font size, prints in black on paper, and survives in a plain-text field that strips emoji. 🙂 does none of that: it arrives yellow, at whatever size the platform chooses, and looks different on Android, iOS and Windows.

For a username, a document, a CSV export or anywhere the appearance has to be predictable, use ☺ ☻ ☹. For a message, where the face is the point, use the emoji.

Typing Smiley Face Symbols on a Keyboard

☺ and ☻ are among the very few symbols with a one-digit Windows shortcut: hold Alt and press 1 for ☺, 2 for ☻. They sit at positions one and two of the original PC character set, which is the same table that puts a heart at Alt+3 and a music note at Alt+13.

Nothing else here is that easy. ☹ needs Alt and 9785, and the emoji faces have no Alt route at all — they are above U+FFFF, outside what those codes can reach. On a Mac, Ctrl+Cmd+Space opens the emoji picker; on Windows, the Windows key and full stop does the same.

Smiley Face Symbols in Black and White

"Black" and "white" in ☻ Black Smiling Face and ☺ White Smiling Face mean filled and outlined, not colour — the same convention as everywhere else in Unicode. Both render in whatever colour your text is. If you want a genuinely monochrome smiley in a design, these two are the only real options here, because every emoji face is drawn in colour by the system.

Types of Smiley Face Symbols

Happy Smiley Face Symbols

😀 😃 😄 😁 😆 😅 🤣 😂 run from a plain grin to laughing until you cry. 🙂 is the slightly smiling face, the closest emoji equivalent of ☺, and 😊 😌 🥰 😍 🤗 cover warmth, contentment and affection.

Upside Down and Ironic Smiley Face Symbols

🙃 is the upside-down face, and it is one of the most searched of all of these. Its formal name says nothing about tone, but in practice it carries irony, resignation or a joke told against yourself. 🥲 is a smiling face with a tear, 😅 a smile with sweat, and 😬 a grimace — all of them smiles doing something other than happiness.

Sad and Worried Smiley Face Symbols

☹ is the text frowning face. In emoji, 🙁 😞 😔 😢 😭 run from mild disappointment to loudly crying, and 😟 😰 😨 😱 cover worry through outright fear.

Playful and Silly Smiley Face Symbols

😉 😜 😝 😛 🤪 🤨 🧐 🤓 are winking, tongue-out, zany, sceptical and studious. 😎 🥳 🥸 are the sunglasses, party and disguised faces.

Unwell and Unusual Smiley Face Symbols

😷 🤒 🤕 🤢 🤮 🤧 🥵 🥶 😵 🤯 cover illness, temperature and being overwhelmed. 🤐 🤫 🤥 🤖 🤡 🤠 are the zipped mouth, shushing, lying, robot, clown and cowboy faces.

Japanese Smiley Face Symbols

〠 is genuinely named Postal Mark Face — a Japanese postal mark drawn as a face, and the only character here besides the classic three whose formal name says "face" without being an emoji. The rest of this group are katakana letters that happen to look like faces when read sideways: ツ is the letter tu and is the best known of them, シ ジ ッ ヅ are si, zi, small tu and du, and ㋡ ㋛ are tu and si enclosed in circles.

They are letters, not faces, and worth taking on those terms — but they render at text size in any font, which is exactly why they turn up in usernames where an emoji would be stripped or resized.

Cat Smiley Face Symbols

😺 😸 😹 😻 😼 😽 🙀 😿 😾 are the same expressions drawn as cats — grinning, tears of joy, heart eyes, wry, kissing, weary, crying and pouting. They exist because the original Japanese carrier sets included them.

Best Uses for Smiley Face Symbols

Smiley Face Symbols in Names and Documents

☺ in a display name reads as friendly without the size jump an emoji brings, and it will not be stripped by a service that filters emoji out of usernames. In a printed document it comes out as ink rather than as a colour picture, which is usually what you want.

Smiley Face Symbols in Messages

Messages are where the emoji faces belong, and where the choice between 🙂 and 😊 and 😀 actually carries tone. Worth knowing that 🙂 has drifted: it is read as passive-aggressive at least as often as friendly in some circles, which 😊 does not.

Smiley Face Symbols Unicode Names and Codes

The formal names are literal about the drawing rather than the feeling: ☺ is U+263A White Smiling Face, ☻ U+263B Black Smiling Face, ☹ U+2639 White Frowning Face, 🙂 U+1F642 Slightly Smiling Face, 🙃 U+1F643 Upside-Down Face, 😂 U+1F602 Face with Tears of Joy.

The three text faces sit at U+2639 to U+263B, low enough that every font has them. The emoji faces start at U+1F600, and the most recent — 🫨 🫩 🫪 — are recent enough that an older device may show an empty box instead.

Frequently Asked Questions About Smiley Face Symbols

How do I type a smiley face on a keyboard?

On Windows, Alt and 1 gives ☺ and Alt and 2 gives ☻, both on the numeric keypad. They are among the shortest Alt codes there are, because they occupied the first two slots of the original PC character set. The emoji faces have no Alt code — use the Windows key and full stop, or Ctrl+Cmd+Space on a Mac.

What is the difference between ☺ and 🙂?

☺ is a text character: it takes your font's colour and size and prints as ink. 🙂 is an emoji, drawn by the platform in colour at a fixed size, and it looks different on every device. Use ☺ where the smiley must match the surrounding text.

What does 🙃 mean?

Formally it is just Upside-Down Face — Unicode does not assign it a mood. In practice it is used for irony, sarcasm, resignation or a joke at your own expense, which is why it reads very differently from 🙂.

Is there a black and white smiley face?

Yes, and they are the oldest ones here: ☺ outlined and ☻ filled. Both take the colour of your text rather than arriving yellow, so they are the only monochrome option on the page. ☹ is the frowning equivalent.

Why does a smiley face show as a box on someone else's screen?

Their font is older than the character. ☺ ☻ ☹ are safe everywhere. The faces added in the last few years — 🫠 🫨 🫩 — are the ones most likely to be missing.

Are the cat faces the same as the human ones?

They are separate characters with their own code points, not a variation applied to the human faces. 😺 😹 😻 correspond to 😀 😂 😍 in expression but each is encoded independently, which is why not every human face has a cat counterpart.

Related Collections for Smiley Face Symbols

For faces built out of punctuation rather than single characters, the lenny face collections assemble them from brackets and diacritics. Hands that appear beside a face are on the hand symbols page, and 😻 shares its hearts with heart symbols. Everything else is indexed at symbol collections.