Happy Text Faces (◕‿◕✿) Smiley Kaomoji

Happy text faces and smiley kaomoji

Smiles, hugs, cheers and cute faces. Click one to copy it.

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A cheerful face with a flower behind one ear

Last checked October 30, 2026 by the TextEditor.com team

What makes a text face look happy?

Take the face (◕‿◕✿) apart and you find three symbols that were never meant to be a face. Each one comes from a different corner of Unicode.

The parts of (◕‿◕✿)

◕U+25D5Circle with all but upper left quadrant black. The white corner looks like light in the eye.

‿U+203FUndertie. Language experts use it to show that two sounds run together.

✿U+273FBlack florette, a printer's flower. Here it is a flower behind the ear.

Japanese style faces put the feeling in the eyes more than in the mouth. That is why happy kaomoji use round, shiny or closed eyes like ◕, ^ and ˘, while the mouth is often just a small curve.

Change one mouth, change the mood

Swap the ‿ for a ︿ and the same eyes look sad: (◕‿◕) becomes (◕︿◕). The ︿ is really a bracket. Japanese and Chinese can be written top to bottom, and in that layout the bracket 〈 is turned on its side. Unicode has a separate sign for the turned bracket, U+FE3F, and that sign makes a perfect frown.

The sad text faces page shows more of these swaps, including the sad Lenny face.

From a small smile to over the moon

Happy scale

From left to right: a little happy, smiling, arms up, cheering and over the moon. Click a face to copy it.

Arms do a lot of the work. The same smile with ヽ and ノ on each side looks like someone cheering, and sparkles like ✧ and ﾟ make it look like they are throwing confetti.

Japanese style vs Western smileys

The Western smiley :-) is read sideways, and it came first. Scott Fahlman suggested it in 1982. Upright faces like (^_^) took off in Japan a few years later on ASCII NET, an early online service. Yasushi Wakabayashi is credited with the first one, (^_^), in 1986. The Japanese name kaomoji means "face characters".

Style	Example	How you read it
Western emoticon	:-) :D ;)	Tilt your head to the left.
Kaomoji	(^_^) (◕‿◕)	Upright, like a face looking at you.

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Frequently asked questions

How do I make a cute smiley face with symbols?

Start with round eyes like ◕ or ^, put a small mouth like ‿ or ▽ between them, and close it with brackets. Add arms such as っ or ヽノ, or a flower ✿ next to an eye. The easiest way is to copy a face from this page and change one part.

What is the face with the flower called?

(◕‿◕✿) is usually called the flower face or "flower behind the ear". The flower is ✿, the black florette, a symbol printers once used for decoration.

Are happy text faces the same as emoji?

No. Emoji are pictures that your phone draws in color. A text face is made of normal letters and symbols, so it takes the color and font of the text around it.

Why does ‿ look different in some apps?

Each app uses its own font. Some fonts draw ‿ as a wide, flat curve and others as a deep one, so the smile can look bigger or smaller. If the font has no ‿ at all, you see a box.

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