Face with Tears of Joy emoji

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Face with Tears of Joy is a laughing face emoji that shows someone crying from laughter. Its Unicode code point is U+1F602. It was added to Unicode in 2010 (Unicode 6.0), the first Unicode release that included emoji characters. It became one of the most popular emojis and was even named Word of the Year in 2015 by Oxford Dictionaries, reflecting the year’s mood.

The emoji has roots in Japan from the late 1990s. It showed up in mobile phone emoji sets from Japanese carriers and was later adopted by Apple, which released its emoji keyboard in Japan in 2008 and then worldwide in 2011 after an iOS update. The worldwide spread helped its popularity explode.

From the mid-2010s, 😂 became a global staple. By 2013 it was described as nearly ubiquitous. In 2014, Twitter data showed it as the second most used emoji. In 2015 it was the most used emoji across major platforms, and Oxford Dictionaries highlighted it as Word of the Year for capturing the year’s playful mood.

The emoji stayed extremely popular on Facebook, Instagram, and Messenger through the late 2010s. It was often the most used emoji in those years, including 2016 and 2017, and Time noted its top status for several years running.

In the early 2020s, its popularity waned a bit among younger users, who many times favor the sobbing emoji (😭) or the skull emoji (💀) and use 😂 more jokingly. Millennials still use it in a genuine way.

Opinions about the emoji vary. Some see it as a perfect symbol for “laughing so hard you cry,” while others view it as overused or annoying. Some scholars note the water drops in the face reflect a manga drawing tradition used to convey strong emotion.

The 😂 emoji also appears in culture, such as the 2020 French novel L’Homme qui pleure de rire, which uses the emoji on the cover. A forthcoming book about emojis titled Face with Tears of Joy was announced for 2025.

Bottom line: Face with Tears of Joy started in Japan, spread worldwide in the early 2010s, and became one of the most recognizable ways to show big laughter online, even as its dominance has faded somewhat in recent years.