Smiley face symbol ☺

• 1963: Harvey Ball, a commercial artist in Worcester, Massachusetts, drew the yellow smiley face for an insurance company’s morale campaign.
• 1981: the IBM PC’s built-in character set put ☺ and ☻ at positions 1 and 2, which is why Alt+1 and Alt+2 still produce them on Windows.
• 1982: Scott Fahlman at Carnegie Mellon University proposed :-) and :-( on an online message board to mark jokes and serious posts.
• Unicode: ☺ and ☻ were included from the early versions, long before emoji sets added colored faces such as 🙂 and 😊.

On phones, ☺ often appears as the colored emoji ☺️, because it is one of the older characters that has both a text style and an emoji style.

• ☻ (black smiling face): the filled version, also from the IBM PC character set.
• 🙂 (slightly smiling face): a modern emoji whose tone varies by reader. Some read it as friendly, others as merely polite or even passive-aggressive.
• 😊 (smiling face with smiling eyes): warmer and clearly happy.
• ツ: the Japanese katakana letter tsu, borrowed as a smiley because it looks like a face with smiling eyes. It is also the face in the shrug ¯\_(ツ)_/¯.

For professional messages, a plain ☺ or 😊 reads warmer than 🙂. In text-only places such as usernames or terminal output, the text-style ☺ is the more reliable choice.

• Windows: hold Alt and press 1 on the numeric keypad for ☺, or Alt+2 for ☻. Some modern apps ignore these short Alt codes; the emoji panel (Windows key + period) always works.
• Word: AutoCorrect turns :) into a smiley, but it uses a glyph from the Wingdings font that may not survive copying. For text that will be pasted elsewhere, insert the Unicode ☺ instead.
• Mac: open the emoji and symbol picker with Control+Command+Space and search “smiling face.”
• iPhone and Android: search “smiling” in the emoji keyboard; ☺️ appears among the faces.
• Text vs. emoji style: the variation selector U+FE0F requests the colored emoji and U+FE0E the plain text glyph, though not every app honors the request.