Smiley

Several terms redirect here. For other uses, see Smiley Face (disambiguation), Happy face (disambiguation), and Smiley (disambiguation).

A smiley, also known as a smiley face, іs a stylized graphic of a smiling face, most commonly depicted as a black circle with two black eyes and a curved mouth, most often on a yellow background.^[1][2] Since the 1950s, it has become part of popular culture worldwide through its commercial use on products and marketing campaigns by a number of corporations, used either as a standalone ideogram or as a form of communication, such as emoticons. The smiley began as two dots and a line representing eyes and a mouth.

Example of a smiley face

An example of an emoticon smiley face (represented using a colon followed by a parenthesis) used in direct communication, as seen in this screenshot of an email.

Another example of a smiley

The smiley face of Sabritas named Oscar, having an open mouth.

While happy-face logos have been used commercially in different contexts and under different brand or campaign names since the early 1960s, the only instance in which the design became known as a brand named Smiley and selling across a large number of consumer products distributed globally as well as for emoticons used in the digital world, is by the Smiley company  created by French journalist Franklin Loufrani in 1971.^[3][4][5]

Earlier campaigns—such as the WMCA radio station “Good Guys” happy face (1961),^[6][7][8]  the “Worcester Smile insurance companies” badge conceived by Joy Young and drawn by Harvey Ball (1963),^[9][10] and the Spain brothers’ “Have a Nice Day” merchandise in Philadelphia (early 1970s)^[11][12]—were local, commercial campaigns that were never trademarked internationally nor developed into brands. In contrast, Loufrani’s Smiley® was trademarked in France in 1971 and expanded globally through The Smiley Company, which from 1997 extended into a digital “Smiley Dictionary” by his son Nicolas Loufran who had created 887 different Smileys by 2003.^[13]

Today, the smiley дщпщ has evolved from an ideogram into a template for communication and use in written language. The internet smiley originated with Scott Fahlman in the 1980s, when he first theorized that ASCII characters could be used to create faces and convey emotions in text. Since then, Fahlman's designs have become digital pictograms known as emoticons.^[14] They are loosely based on the ideograms designed in the 1960s and 1970s, continuing with the yellow and black design.

Origin

As a surname and adjective

The word smiley can be traced back to Lanarkshire, Scotland, as a surname, and is home to other variations such as Smylie, Smyly, or Smaillie.^[15] During this period in history, surnames emerged from medieval nicknames. In this scenario, it would describe a person with a cheerful nature.^[16] The first recorded person is believed to be Thomas Smiley, who was recorded in Derry, Northern Ireland, in 1660 as a major military figure.^[17] As a Williamite and following the migration of Scots to Ireland in the Plantation of Ulster, Thomas Smiley would likely have been a descendant of migrants from Lanarkshire in the previous century.

As an adjective, the word "smiley" was used in literature occasionally, but it came after the word was used as a surname. As with the surname, smiley came about from the creative or colloquial shortening of smiling to mimic spoken dialect.^[18] James Russell Lowell used the word "smily" to replace “smiling” in his mid-19th-century poem, The Courtin’.^[19][20] Over a century later, in 1957, author Jane McHenry in Family Weekly magazine wrote, "Draw a big smiley face on the plate!"^[21] A year later, there was an illustration of a noseless smiling face containing two dots, eyebrows, and a single curved line for a mouth in a write-up in Family Weekly, Galloping Ghosts! by Bill Ross, with the text:

Collect six empty pop bottles and six cone-shaped paper cups. With crayons draw smiley faces on three of the cups and scary ones on the others. Put a cup on top of each bottle and line them up as 'ghosts.'. .Keep score by counting five points for each scary-faced ghost knocked over and, since it is a night for spooks, only one point for each smiley!^[22]

As a brand name

Early designs were often referred to as “smile”, "smiling face" or "happy face". In 1961 the New York radio station WMCA used a simple smiling face on yellow sweatshirts and promotional items as part of its “Good Guys” disc-jockey campaign. This is among the earliest widely publicized happy-face logos in the United States.^[23]

In Worcester, Massachusetts, State Mutual Life Assurance initiated a morale-boosting campaign. Joy Young, the company’s Assistant Director of Sales and Marketing, conceived a marketing campaign and commissioned freelance artist Harvey Ball to draw a cheerful design. Ball produced a yellow face with oval eyes and a curved mouth in ten minutes for a $45 fee. The resulting “Worcester Smile insurance companies” badge was printed on buttons and posters, but never trademarked or commercialized outside the company.

In Philadelphia, novelty merchandisers Bernard and Murray Spain produced millions of buttons and T-shirts featuring a smiling face with the slogan “Have a Nice Day.” The slogan and design combination was trademarked in the United States, but the campaign did not evolve into a long lasting commercial  brand.^[8][11][24]

In 1971 French journalist Franklin Loufrani introduced a smiling face in France-Soir to mark positive stories under the heading Prenez le temps de sourire (“Take the time to smile”). Loufrani filed for a French trademark in October 1971, making his rendition the first legally registered smiling-face trademark. Through the 1970s and 1980s, Loufrani expanded licensing internationally, registering the Smiley name and logo as trademarks across multiple classes of goods and services as the business grew. He established The Smiley Company, which grew into one of the world’s leading licensing enterprise.^[25]

Competing terms were used, such as smile, smiling face and happy face, before consensus was reached on the term smiley promoted by the Smiley Company. The ideogram has since been used as a foundation to create emoticon emojis. These are digital interpretations of the smiley ideogram and have since become the most commonly used set of emojis, as they were adopted by Unicode in 2006 onwards. Smiley has since become a broader term that often includes both the ideogram design and emojis that use the same yellow and black design.

In the mid-1990s, Franklin’s son Nicolas Loufrani joined The Smiley Company. Observing the rise of digital communication, Nicolas developed the Smiley Dictionary in 1997, a structured set of graphical icons representing emotions, objects, and concepts all using Smiley’s eyes and mouth. This initiative positioned Smiley as not only a brand but also a digital visual language, prefiguring the later global adoption of emojis. The Smiley Dictionary was used as a toolbar and widely licensed to mobile and tech companies, making Nicolas Loufrani a pioneer in commercializing graphic emoticons. He has been described as the emoji godfather. ^[26]

In the 1990s, Wal-Mart used a smiling yellow face in its “rollback” price campaign. This logo was later subject to trademark disputes with The Smiley Company.^[27][28]

Variants of the smiling face appeared in U.S. basketball promotions (e.g. David Stern’s NBA campaigns),^[29] rave culture in the UK,^[30] and elsewhere.

Ideogram history

Early history of smiling faces

The oldest known smiling face was found by a team of archaeologists led by Nicolò Marchetti of the University of Bologna. Marchetti and his team pieced together fragments of a Hittite pot, dating back to approximately 1700 BC, found in Karkamış, Turkey. Once the pot had been pieced together, the team noticed that the item had a large smiling face engraved on it, becoming the first item with such a design to be found.^[31]

Page from the score of Erwin Schulhoff's "In Futurum" (one of his "Fünf Pittoresken") includes smiley faces

The score of Erwin Schulhoff's "In Futurum" (the middle movement of his "Fünf Pittoresken", published in 1919) includes smiling and sad faces.^[32][33]

In the 1930s, an eccentric Depression-era tramp was popularly dubbed "Santa Claus Smith". He identified himself as John S. Smith of Riga, Latvia, Europe. He wandered across the United States, giving hand-scrawled checks for extravagant sums to people who showed him small kindnesses, such as meals, coffee, or lifts. His checks were written in indelible pencil on scraps of brown wrapping paper. They typically featured a crude smiling-face doodle—two dots for eyes, a dot for a nose, and a curved line for a mouth. His idiosyncratic handwriting often included the misspelling of "thousand" Contemporary documentation of his checks and the doodled smile can be found in bank correspondence reviewed for Joseph Mitchell’s 1940 profile. Later historical accounts have highlighted the episode as an early cultural appearance of a smile motif in the United States.^[34][35]

Ingmar Bergman's 1948 film Port of Call features a scene where the unhappy Berit (played by Nine-Christine Jönsson^[36]) draws a sad face – closely resembling the modern "frowny" face but with a dot for the nose – in lipstick on her mirror before being interrupted.^[37][38] In September 1963, there was the premiere^[39] of The Funny Company, an American children's TV program, which had a noseless Smiling face used as a kids' club logo; the closing credits ended with the message, "Keep Smiling!"^{[40][41][42][43]}

Dating from 1741 to 1953, a collection of smiling face designs from illustrations from literature, advertising, and promotional material. They include the film poster for the 1953 film, Lili.

In the latter half of the 20th century, the face now known as a smiley has evolved into a well-known symbol recognizable for its yellow and black features. The first known combination of yellow and black was used for a smiling face in late 1962, when New York City radio station WMCA released a yellow sweatshirt as part of a marketing campaign.^[44][45] By 1963, over 11,000 sweatshirts had been given away. They had featured in Billboard magazine, and numerous celebrities had also been pictured wearing them, including actress Patsy King and Mick Jagger.^[6][38] The radio station used the happy face as part of a competition for listeners. When the station called listeners, any listener who answered their phone with "WMCA Good Guys!" was rewarded with a "WMCA Good Guys!" sweatshirt that incorporated the yellow and black happy face into its design.^[46][47][48] The features of the WMCA smiley were a yellow face, with black dots as eyes, and a slightly crooked smile. The outline of the face was also not smooth, giving it a more hand-drawn look.^[48] Originally, the yellow and black sweatshirt (sometimes referred to as gold), had WMCA Good Guys! written on the front with no smiley face.^[49][44]

"Authentic Worcester-made smiley face", by Harvey Ball

A number of United States–based designs of yellow and black happy faces emerged over the next decade.^[50][10][49] State Mutual Life Assurance Company in Worcester, Massachusetts, wanted to raise the morale of its staff following a merger with another insurance company.^[51] Company Vice President John Adam, Jr., suggested a "friendship campaign". He assigned Joy Young, Assistant Director of Sales and Marketing, to lead the project. According to Worcester Historical Museum's documents, Young requested that freelance artist Harvey Ball design "a little smile to be used on buttons, desk cards and posters".^[52] Ball completed the happy face in ten minutes and was paid $45 (equivalent to $462 in 2024).^[47][8] His rendition, with a bright yellow background, dark oval eyes, a full smile, and creases at the sides of the mouth,^[48] was imprinted on more than fifty million buttons and became familiar worldwide. The design is so simple that it is certain that similar versions were produced before 1963, including those cited above.^[47][8]

In 1967, Seattle graphic artist George Tanagi^[53] drew his own version at the request of advertising agent David Stern. Tanagi's design was used in a Seattle-based University Federal Savings & Loan advertising campaign.^[54] Lee Adams's lyrics inspired the "Put on a Happy Face" ad campaign from the musical Bye Bye Birdie. Stern, the man behind this campaign, also incorporated the Happy Face in his run for Seattle mayor in 1993.^[8] Throughout the 1960s, the term "happy face" was used much more commonly in the United States than "smiley" to describe earlier versions of commercial smiling face designs.^[55]

The Philadelphia-based brothers Bernard and Murray Spain also used the design on novelty items for their business, Traffic Stoppers. They focused on the slogan "Have a happy day." The Spain brothers expanded their business rapidly, selling millions of buttons in several sizes by 1971. They reported that they did not receive royalties from other companies producing smile designs and only claimed limited copyright protection when the image was paired with text such as "Have a Happy Day" or "Have a Nice Day". They also carried other manufacturers’ smile products alongside their own, reasoning that these "just enhance our own products".^[11][12] which mutated into "Have a nice day." They also produced happy face badges, producing over 50 million with New York button manufacturer NG Slater.^[56][57][58]

In 1972, Frenchman Franklin Loufrani trademarked a version of a smiley face. He used it to highlight the good news parts of the newspaper France Soir. He simply called the design "Smiley" and launched The Smiley Company. In 1996, Nicolas Loufrani, the son of Franklin Loufrani, took over the family business and built it into a multinational corporation. Nicolas Loufrani was outwardly skeptical of Harvey Ball's claim to have created the first smiley face. While noting that the design his father came up with and Ball's design were nearly identical, Loufrani argued that the design is so simple that no one person can claim to have created it. As evidence for this, Loufrani's website cites early cave paintings found in France (dating back to 2500 BC) that he claims are the first depictions of a smiley face. Loufrani also points to a 1960 radio ad campaign that reportedly employed a similar design.^[10][38]

The Smiley Company owns the rights to the Smiley trademark for lifestyle consumer products in one hundred countries.^[59] Its subsidiary, SmileyWorld Ltd, in London, creates or approves all of the licensed Smiley products sold in countries where it holds the trademark.^[25] The Smiley brand and logo have significant exposure through licensees in various sectors, including clothing, home decoration, perfumery, plush, stationery, and publishing, as well as through promotional campaigns.^[60] The Smiley Company is one of the 100 top licensing companies in the world, with a 2022 turnover over $500 million.^[61][62] The first Smiley shop opened in London in the Boxpark shopping center in December 2011.^[63] In 2022, there were many birthday celebrations for the smiley. Many of these came in the form of collaborations between The Smiley Company and large retailers, such as Nordstrom.^[64]

The digital evolution of the smiley into online communication began in the late 1990s with its incorporation into early emoticons and instant messaging systems. The digital smiley movement was headed up by Nicolas Loufrani, the CEO of The Smiley Company.^[65] He created a smiley toolbar, which was available at smileydictionary.com during the early 2000s to be sent as gif files and inserted on any Instant messaging or email service. Icons largely inspired by his work were later named emojis.^[66] Over the next years, The Smiley Dictionary became the plug-in of choice for forums and online instant messaging platforms. There were competitors, but The Smiley Dictionary was the most popular and enabled the Smiley Company to grow its business to become one of the 100 biggest licensed IPs in the world. Platforms such as MSN Messenger allowed for customisation from 2001 onwards, with many users importing emoticons to use in messages as text. These emoticons would eventually go on to become the modern-day emoji.

The Smiley Company also licensed its emoticons to phone manufacturers such as Alcatel which was the first one to feature the logo on its screen in 1997 and to Motorola, Samsung or Nokia, the leading manufacturers of the time.^[67] Nicolas Loufrani declared to French newspaper le Figaro that emojis copied Smiley,^[68] but the Smiley Company allowed the big tech platforms to be inspired by its work seeing it as something that would be beneficial for people to communicate, Loufrani  commented "I have to say Apple and then Unicode made my project to build a universal language much bigger and took it to another level, with a technology and network effect I did not have, they made my dream possible."

Microsoft’s 2004 beta of MSN Messenger 7, for instance, included "special emoticons, the smiley faces and other icons that indicate emotions".^[69] Independent reporting distinguishes between "emoticons", which are text-based symbols popularized in the 1980s, and "emoji", which originated with NTT DoCoMo in Japan in the late 1990s.^[70]

Smiley ball at London 2012 Olympics

In recent times, the smiley has been used as a symbol for happiness or to spread joy in public places or at various events. One recorded example of this was at the London 2012 opening ceremony. Balls were released into the crowd as the show began. The balls were large but light enough that members of the crowd could use them like a beach ball, with each ball containing a large black smiley face on one side.^[71]

In China, there has been a steady growth in the use of smileys in its culture, both as a physical brand and also digitally.^[72] This rise in popularity has led to the opening of numerous smiley merchandise stores in the country. By the end of 2024, 15 stores had opened in the country in cities such as Guangzhou, Suzhou, and Xiamen. It was expected that the number could top 50 stores by the end of 2027.^[73] Other countries in Asia were also experiencing a similar boom, including Thailand, where three stores opened in 2024.^[74]

Language and communication

Main article: Emoticon

The earliest known smiling face to be included in a written document was drawn by a Slovak notary to indicate his satisfaction with the state of his town's municipal financial records in 1635.^[75] The gold smiling face was drawn on the bottom of the legal document, appearing next to lawyer Jan Ladislaides' signature.^[76] The Danish poet and author Johannes V. Jensen was famous for experimenting with the form of his writing, amongst other things. In a letter sent to publisher Ernst Bojesen in December 1900, he includes both a happy and a sad face. It was in the 1900s that the design evolved from a basic eye and mouth design into a more recognizable design.^[77]

A disputed early use of a smiling ASCII emoticon in a printed text may have been in Robert Herrick's poem To Fortune (1648),^[78] which contains the line "Upon my ruins (smiling yet :)". Journalist Levi Stahl has suggested that this may have been an intentional "orthographic joke". However, this occurrence is likely merely the colon placed inside parentheses rather than outside of them, as is standard typographic practice today: "(smiling yet):". There are citations of similar punctuation in a non-humorous context, even within Herrick's own work.^[79] It is likely that the parenthesis was added later by modern editors.^[80]

On the Internet, emojis have become a visual means of conveyance that uses images. Early pixel emojis are widely credited by the media to have been conceived by Shigetaka Kurita for NTT Docomo in 1997 but an earlier set of 90 pixelised emojis has been launched in 1997 by J-Phone in Japan. Both early sets of pixel emojis bear no resemblance with current smiley inspired emojis launched by Apple with Softbank in Japan in 2008 and now used commercially by a number of tech brands including Meta, Android or Samsung.^[81] The early sets of emojis released by Google were square in multiple bright colours, they then used blobs, shaped like a finger tip,^[82] the first ones by Android represented its green droid trademark,^[83] Disney also released sets of Disney emoji^[84] based on its popular characters while Pepsi launched Pepsimoji,^[85] all these uses confirm the business rationale behind all these projects, with the companies behind them trying to create their own intellectual property and brand identity to commercialise their products or services.

The first known instance of punctuation made ASCII emoticons use on the Internet was on 19 September 1982, when Scott Fahlman from Carnegie Mellon University wrote:

I propose that the following character sequence for joke markers:

 :-)

 Read it sideways. Actually, it is probably more economical to mark
 things that are NOT jokes, given current trends. For this, use

 :-(^[86][14]

Yellow graphical smileys have been used for many different purposes, including use in early 1980s video games. Yahoo! Messenger (from 1998) used smiley symbols in the user list next to each user, and also as an icon for the application. In November 2001, and later, smiley emojis inside the actual chat text was adopted by several chat systems, including Yahoo Messenger.

Smiley faces from DOS code page 437

The smiley is the printable version of characters 1 and 2 of (black-and-white versions of) codepage 437 (1981) of the first IBM PC and all subsequent PC compatible computers. For modern computers, all versions of Microsoft Windows after Windows 95^[87] can use the smiley as part of Windows Glyph List 4, although some computer fonts miss some characters.^[88]

The smiley face was included in Unicode's Miscellaneous Symbols from version 1.1 (1993).^[89]

Unicode smiley characters:
☺	U+263A	Alt+1	White Smiling Face (This may appear as an emoji on some devices)
☻	U+263B	Alt+2	Black Smiling Face
Miscellaneous Symbols also contains the frowning face:
☹	U+2639		White Frowning Face

Later additions to Unicode included a large number of variants expressing a range of human emotions, in particular with the addition of the "Emoticons" and "Supplemental Symbols and Pictographs blocks in Unicode versions 6.0 (2010) and 8.0 (2015), respectively. These were introduced for compatibility with the ad-hoc implementation of emoticons by Japanese telephone carriers in unused ranges of the Shift JIS standard. This resulted in a de facto standard in the range with lead bytes 0xF5 to 0xF9.^[90]KDDI has gone much further than this, introducing hundreds more in the space with lead bytes 0xF3 and 0xF4.^[91]

Recent studies have investigated how various demographic factors influence individuals' interpretations and representations of smiley faces. A notable study by Clarke et al. (2018) involved an observational study with 723 participants who were "asked to draw a smiley face for themselves" to examine the impact of gender and age on the way individuals depict smiley faces upon prompting. The findings revealed significant disparities: women and younger participants (aged 30 or younger) were more inclined to illustrate traditional smiley faces, characterized by simple designs that primarily include eyes and a mouth, often excluding additional features such as noses or outlines. These results highlight the presence of demographic biases in the interpretation and depiction of smiley faces, underscoring the need for careful consideration of these factors in research and surveys that utilize smileys or similar facial symbols, particularly those that rely on self-reported outcomes or scales incorporating facial images to denote emotional or evaluative states.^[92]

• 
  smiling face
   :)
• 
  winking face
   ;)
• 
  surprised face
  :O
• 
  confused face
   :/

• 
  sad face
   :(
• 
  crying face
   :'(
• 
  grinning face
  :D
• 
  kissing face
   :*

Symbolism in popular culture and applications

The smiley has now become synonymous with culture worldwide. It is used for communication, imagery, branding, and topical purposes to display a range of emotions. In print, numerous brands have used a yellow happy face to symbolize happiness, dating back to the 1960s.

United States advertising campaigns

Different designs were used in advertising campaigns in the early to mid-20th century. Much of this activity was centered on the Northeastern United States.^{[citation needed]} One of the first known commercial uses of a smiling face was in 1919, when the Buffalo Steam Roller Company in Buffalo, New York, applied stickers on receipts with the word "thanks" and a smiling face above it. The face contained a lot of detail, with eyebrows, a nose, teeth, a chin, and facial creases reminiscent of "man-in-the-Moon" style characteristics.^[93] Another early commercial use of a smiling face was in 1922 when the Gregory Rubber Company of Akron, Ohio, ran an ad for "smiley face" balloons in The Billboard. This happy face had hair, a nose, teeth, pie eyes, and triangles over the eyes.^[94] In 1953 and 1958, similar happy faces were used in promotional campaigns for the films Lili (1953) and Gigi (1958).^[95]

Happy faces in the northeastern United States, and later in the entire country, became a "common theme" within advertising circles from the 1960s onwards. This rose to prominence during the 1960s and was remixed and interpreted in different ways up until the 1980s. There were sporadic designs of smiling faces or happy faces before this, but it wasn't until the WMCA in the early 1960s used yellow and black that the theme became more commonplace.

In print

In the United States, there were many instances of smiling faces in the 1900s. However, the first industry to widely adopt the smiley was the comics and cartoons sector.

Franklin Loufrani used the word smiley when he designed a smiling face for the newspaper he was working for at the time. The Loufrani design emerged in 1971, when Loufrani created a smiley face for the newspaper France-Soir. The newspaper used Loufrani's smiley to highlight stories that they defined as "feel-good news"^[25] This particular smiley went on to form The Smiley Company. Mad magazine notably used the smiley face a year later, in 1972, across its entire front page for the April edition of the magazine. This was one of the first instances in which the smiling face had been adapted, with one of the twenty visible smileys pulling a face.^[96]

In the DC Comics, shady businessman "Boss Smiley" (a political boss with a smiley face for a head) makes several appearances.^[97]

The logo for and cover of the omnibus edition of the Watchmen comic book series features a smiley badge worn by the character, the Comedian, with blood splattered on it from the murder that initiates the events of the story.

Street artist André Saraiva  was tasked with redesigning the Smiley logo for the 50th anniversary of the Smiley company and the result was used on a marketing campaign with billboards featuring the Smiley logo and message take the time to smile as street art in many big urban centers across the world including New York, Los Angeles, Paris, Berlin, Milan, London, Sydney, Seoul, Shanghai.^[98]

Music and film

As music genres began to develop their own cultures from the 1970s onwards, many cultures started incorporating a smiling face into their culture. In the late 1970s, the American band Dead Kennedys launched their first recording, "California über alles". The single cover was a collage intended to resemble a Nazi rally prior to World War II. It featured three of the vertical banners commonly used at such rallies, but with the usual swastikas replaced by large smileys.^[99] In the UK, the happy face has been associated with psychedelic culture since the Ubi Dwyer and the Windsor Free Festival in the 1970s, as well as with electronic dance music culture, particularly with acid house, which emerged during the Second Summer of Love in the late 1980s. The association was cemented when the band Bomb the Bass used an extracted smiley from the comic book series Watchmen on the center of its "Beat Dis" hit single.

The Watchmen comic series logo

In addition to the movie adaptation of Watchmen, the film Suicide Squad has the character Deadshot staring into the window of a clothing store. Behind a line of mannequins is a yellow smiley face pin, which had been closely associated with another DC comic character, the Comedian.^[100] The 2001 film Evolution features a three-eyed smiley face as its logo. It was later carried over to the movie's spin-off cartoon, Alienators: Evolution Continues.

In the late 1980s, the smiley again became a prominent image within the music industry. It was adopted during the growth of acid house across Europe and the UK in the late 1980s. According to many, this began when DJ Danny Rampling used the smiley to celebrate Paul Oakenfold's birthday.^[101] This sparked a movement in which the smiley face moved into various dance genres, becoming a symbol of 1980s dance music.^[102]

In the film Forrest Gump (1994), it is implied that the titular character inspired the smiley face design after wiping his face on a T-shirt while running across the country.

In 2022, David Guetta collaborated with Felix Da Housecat and Kittin to release the song, Silver Screen, a reimagined version of the 2001 dance track. Guetta's version celebrated positivity and happiness.^[103] The music video features a cameo from street artist André Saraiva and portrays different groups portraying the message "Take The Time To Smile." The video partners that message with numerous smileys, on the sides of buildings, on placards, and on posters.

Physical products

Vittel announced in 2017 that it would be using the smiley on a special edition design of its water bottles. AdAge referred to its use as a "feel-good effect," and water bottles featuring the smiley icon had an 11.8% increase in sales compared to standard bottles, with 128 million bottles sold across Europe that bore the smiley design.^[104] In the UK, "Jammie Dodgers", a legendary biscuit line, features a smiley face engraved into circular cookies.

Art and fashion

Smilies in Tel Aviv street art

As part of his early works, anti-consumerist graffiti artist Banksy frequently incorporated the smiley face into his art. The first of his major works that included a smiley was his Flying Copper portrait, which was completed in 2004. It was during a period when Banksy experimented with creating portraits on canvas and paper. He also used the smiley in 2005 to replace the Grim Reaper's face. The image became known as "grin reaper"^[105][106] In 2007, In 2007, The Smiley Company partnered with Moschino for the campaign, "Smiley for Moschino.^[107]

In March 2017, Smiley partnered with skate-inspired brand Palm Angels on a capsule apparel collection featuring hoodies, T-shirts, sneakers, windbreakers and Smiley badges, with the Smiley’s eyes replaced by the “P & A” logo.^[108]

In October 2019, Smiley and Ellesse launched a seasonal capsule for SS20, blending Ellesse’s heritage sportswear silhouettes with Smiley graphics across a 21-piece women’s collection and a smaller men’s range.^[109]

During the COVID-19 pandemic, fashion label Pull & Bear announced they would be releasing t-shirts with a smiley design incorporated on the front.^[104] Other fashion labels that have used the smiley on their garments include H&M and Zara. The smiley has also featured on high-end fashion lines, including Fendi and Moncler.^[110] High-end French jeweller Valerie Messika produced white gold and yellow pendants, which contained a smiley face.^[111]

In June 2020, Loewe collaborated with Paula’s Ibiza on a summer capsule collection presenting the Smiley trademark in fluorescent yellow, green and orange across tie-dye T-shirts, oversized jumpers, swim shorts, bags and accessories, evoking the 1970s hippie lifestyle.^[112]

For the 50th birthday of the Smiley, Galeries Lafayette in Paris, Beijing, and Shanghai, as well as 10 Nordstrom department stores, sold limited-edition smiley products to commemorate the anniversary.^[113] During the same year, Lee Jeans announced the launch of a new clothing collection, Lee x Smiley.^[114]

In March 2022, to mark its 50th anniversary, Smiley also teamed up with Parisian jeweller Messika on a trio of “world’s most expensive” diamond-set novelties, including an XXL chain set with over 7.9 carats of yellow and white diamonds forming the iconic smiling face.^[115] Simultaneously, Colette co-founder Sarah Andelman curated a global “Collector’s Edition” programme, inviting more than fifty brands—ranging from Raf Simons and Sandro to Karl Lagerfeld, Reebok and Dsquared 2—to apply the Smiley brand logo across twelve product categories from apparel to beauty and homewares.^{[116][117][118]}

That anniversary campaign extended into experiential retail with a Europe-wide pop-up in Urban Outfitters stores, featuring immersive installations and a Smiley-themed changing room designed to “make you smile”.^[119]

In January 2022, Italian label Philosophy di Lorenzo Serafini collaborated with the Smiley Company on a limited-edition capsule collection featuring the Smiley logoacross T-shirts, hoodies, cardigans, bikinis, and totes.^[120][121]

In September 2023, Lacoste and Smiley introduced a China-exclusive collection that merged the Smiley logo with Lacoste’s crocodile motif on apparel and accessories.^[122]

In February 2025, Adidas Originals in collaboration with Smiley released three capsule lines featuring the Smiley-shaped trefoil logo on footwear, apparel and accessories.^[123]

In 2022 the luxury watch brand Richard Mille launched the RM88 tourbillon Smiley, a watch selling for 1,100,000 euros produced as a limited edition of 50 watches. It was famously worn by Pharell Willams, a collector of Richard Mille watches.^[124]

Gaming

In 1980, Namco released the now-famous Pac-Man, a yellow-faced cartoon character. In 2008, the video game Battlefield: Bad Company featured a yellow smiley as part of its branding. The smiley appeared throughout the game and also on the cover. The smiley normally appeared on the side of a grenade, which became synonymous with the Battlefield series.^[125]

The 1987 Atari ST game MIDI Maze, released on other platforms as Faceball 2000, features round, yellow Smileys as enemies. When a player is eliminated, these enemies taunt the player with the phrase "Have a nice day."

The Pokémon Ditto is based on the smiley face. Game Freak's staff described Ditto as "the weirdest Pokémon" in the franchise.^[126]

Events, business, and social sciences

User experience researchers have shown that the use of smileys to represent measurement scales may ease the challenges related to translation and implementation for brief cross-cultural surveys.^[127] Walmart uses a smiley face as its mascot.^[128] During the London 2012 opening ceremony, early on in the show, a number of giant yellow beach balls were released into the audience. Each had a large smiley face.^[129]

The Brooklyn Bridge had a smiley projected onto the base one evening in 2020. The smiley was part of a wider campaign by The Smiley Company aimed at increasing happiness among New Yorkers. The 82-foot-wide projected smiley featured light pink lipstick on the mouth of the smiley.^[130]

In 2022, Assouline published "50 Years of Good News," a comprehensive examination of the cultural development of the smiley face and its widespread use.^[131]

Yu Gi Oh! The popular manga franchise has a character named Nico Smiley, wearing a suit made of yellow and black stripes.

In 2022, the International Day of Happiness was celebrated by projecting a smiley onto a number of landmarks around the globe. In Seoul, South Korea, a smiley celebrating happiness was projected onto the Seoul Tower.^[132]

Claim of ownership and trademark disputes

All iterations of the smiling face prior to Loufrani—including WMCA, Worcester, Spain brothers, and Wal-Mart—were commercial campaign graphics which enjoyed common law trademark rights in the USA. None were registered internationally as brands

In contrast, Smiley, created and trademarked by Franklin Loufrani i, is the only version structured as a global trademark and copyrights portfolio supporting a commercial business in lifestyle consumer products. Multiple entities may own or register variations of similar simple marks in different markets and for other categories of products or services, which is a normal outcome in international trademark law.^[133][134]  

In 1997, Franklin Loufrani attempted to trademark the ideogram he created in the United States. Walmart contested his application, as it began using a similar graphic for its "Rolling Back Prices" campaign a year prior. The fallout led to a 2002 court case that lasted more than a decade before a settlement was reached.^[135][136] Despite that, Walmart sued an online parodist for alleged "trademark infringement" after he used the symbol. The District Court found in favor of the parodist when, in March 2008, the judge concluded that Walmart's smiley face logo was not shown to be "inherently distinctive" and that it "has failed to establish that the smiley face has acquired secondary meaning or that it is otherwise a protectable trademark" under U.S. law.^{[137][138][139]} In June 2010, Walmart and The Smiley Company founded by Loufrani settled their 10-year-old dispute in front of the Chicago federal court. The terms remain confidential.^[140][141] In 2016, Walmart reintroduced the smiley face on its website, social media profiles, and in select stores.^[142]

The band Nirvana created its own smiley design in 1991.^[143] It was claimed that Kurt Cobain designed the Nirvana smiley. In 2020, media reports suggested that a Los Angeles–based freelance designer was, in fact, behind the designs.^[143]

Fashion house Marc Jacobs designed a smiley in 2018, which had a yellow outline, with the letters M and J replacing the eyes. The mouth design was similar to the Nirvana design. In January 2019, legal representatives of Nirvana announced they were suing Marc Jacobs for a breach of copyright.^[144] Following the announcement by a judge in Los Angeles that the suit could move forward, Marc Jacobs announced a countersuit against Nirvana.^[145] In 2020, a Los Angeles–based designer claimed to be the creator of the Nirvana smiley and thus became an intervenor in the case between Nirvana and Marc Jacobs.^[146]

Joe Boxer has registered an alternative version of the smiley logo with its tongue out in the USA where it built a substantial underwear business during the 1990’s, with sales reaching 100M USD per year before the company collapsed after a licensing dispute with Van Mar.^[147][148]

The emoji company based in Germany has registered 1000 trademarks for the emoji name in 150 countries and claims copyrights to 25000 emoji graphics. It has created a cartoon called Emojitown available on Youtube and operates a licensing program for its IP assets.^[149] 

See also

• Acid2
• Body language
• Facial Action Coding System
• Galle (Martian crater)
• Henohenomoheji
• Kolobok
• Mr. Yuk
• Pac-Man (character)
• Pareidolia
• Red John
• SDSS J1038+4849
• Social intelligence