Smileys & Emotion
Smileys & Emotion is the heart of emoji. It groups the yellow faces, the hearts, and the small set of expressive symbols people use every day to give a message its tone. On EmojiSelect this category holds 172 emoji, organized into the same subcategories the Unicode Consortium defines: smiling faces, affectionate faces, tongue-out faces, hand-to-face gestures, skeptical faces, sleepy and unwell faces, faces with hats and glasses, concerned and negative faces, costumes, cat and monkey faces, hearts, and a handful of other emotion marks.
About this category
The category has the longest history in emoji. The first pictographic sets from Japanese mobile carriers in the late 1990s were almost entirely faces and hearts, and when Unicode 6.0 standardized emoji in 2010, the smileys formed its core. That heritage is why this family contains both the oldest emoji still in use and some of the newest additions in each Unicode release.
Our browse page orders these 172 entries by what people actually copy, and each subcategory — smiling, affection, tongue, hand, skeptical, sleepy, unwell, hat, glasses, concerned, negative, costume, cat, monkey, heart and emotion — links straight to its members. Open any face and one page gives you the meaning, conversational notes, usage examples, related emoji and copy formats.
172 Emoji16 subcategories
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Popular emoji
172 Emoji
Browse by subcategory
16 subcategories · 172 Emoji in this category
Go deeper: People & Body
Concerned faces
27 Emoji
Hearts
25 Emoji
Neutral & skeptical faces
16 Emoji
Smiling faces
15 Emoji
Emotions
15 Emoji
Unwell faces
12 Emoji
Affectionate faces
9 Emoji
Cat faces
9 Emoji
Negative faces
8 Emoji
Costumed faces
8 Emoji
Hand faces
7 Emoji
Sleepy faces
6 Emoji
Tongue faces
6 Emoji
Faces with glasses
3 Emoji
Faces in hats
3 Emoji
Monkey faces
3 Emoji
Why it matters
These emoji do the work of tone. A message that might read cold — a correction, a refusal, a piece of bad news — softens with a single face. A compliment gains warmth with a heart. Because the meaning of a face can shift with platform and age group, we document conversational usage, common misunderstandings and safer alternatives on each emoji's own page. The category keeps growing with every Unicode release: Emoji 9.0 brought 🤣 and 🤠, Emoji 11.0 added 🥰 and 🤩, Emoji 13.1 introduced ❤️🔥, and Emoji 14.0 gave us 🥹 and 🫶 — so the oldest emoji family is also among the freshest.
Highlights
Faces: the largest group, from 😀 to 🤯, covering the spectrum between delight and dread, plus the classic 🤣 and 😂 laughter faces.
Hearts: every color carries a different register — red for romantic love, 🖤 for dark humor and aesthetic, 💙 for friendship, and ❤️🔥 for passion.
Hand-to-face gestures: 🤗 hugging face, 🤔 thinking face and 🤭 hand-over-mouth each signal a distinct conversational move.
How people use them
Reacting to good news: 🎉 plus 😄 and a ❤️.
Showing affection without romance: 🥰 or 💕.
Softening a serious message: end the sentence with 🙂.
Celebrating a small win at work: 🙌 is not in this category, but it pairs naturally with a 😁.