Shady Characters

This is the first in a series of four posts on 2025 Advent calendar. Continue to PART 2 or view ALL POSTS in the series.

Welcome to the 2025 Shady Characters advent calendar! I’ll be counting down to Christmas by way of ten of the most interesting, controversial, and downright odd emoji to have appeared on our screens. Enjoy, and come back every other day or so for a new entry!

You know this guy, right? FACE WITH TEARS OF JOY, also known as the “cry-laugh” emoji, has been the most commonly-used emoji in the world for much of its existence. Barring a brief fall from grace during the Covid-19 pandemic in favour of ‘😭’ (and let’s face it, we didn’t have quite as much to be joyful about back them),1,2 ‘😂’ has been a constant companion in the new world of emoji.

‘😂’ made its formal debut in 2010, when, along with hundreds of other Japanese emoji, it was added to a standards document, called Unicode, which governs the characters our computers and smartphones can exchange.3 Google and Apple had shipped non-standard, bootleg emoji a couple of years earlier,4,5 but 2010 marked the point at which emoji could, and did, go global.

FACE WITH TEARS OF JOY was one of emoji’s early winners. In 2014, Mona Chalabi of 538 noted that on Twitter, only ‘♥️’ was used more frequently,6 and, by the following year, ‘😂’ was arguably the most popular emoji in the world.7 It was so common, in fact, that Oxford Dictionaries felt able to name it as word of the year.8

Then the backlash began. ‘😂’ had always been a very demonstrative emoji, as Amy O’Connor noted for The Daily Edge in 2015, but was it perhaps too dramatic? O’Connor called FACE WITH TEARS OF JOY “basic as hell”, and lamented that its use was almost always unwarranted.9 Whether O’Connor was right or wrong, something had broken the thread which connected this particular emoji’s meaning to its appearance. Slowly, inexorably, ‘😂’ came to embody not a joyful or empathetic reaction but rather a mirthless laugh of derision.* Abi Wilkinson, writing for the Guardian in 2016, branded it “mocking and cruel”.10 In 2021, CNN would tell us “Sorry, millennials. The 😂 emoji isn’t cool anymore”,11 and Vice would call it “the most divisive emoji in history” with only a pinch of exaggeration.2

And yet! For all the brickbats, FACE WITH TEARS OF JOY is still very popular. Quantifying exactly how popular is tricky to do, as we’ll see in a future advent calendar entry, but I am comfortable in stating that as of December 2025 it is almost certainly within the top five emoji worldwide. How can this be? How can such an overexposed emoji of debatable sincerity stay at the top of the heap? The answer, I suspect, lies in a combination of ignorance and malice. Some people like it because they see it as positive; others like it because they see it as negative. There’s a lesson here to be learned, I’m sure.

Thanks for reading! If you’d like to learn more about emoji, take a look at my latest book, FACE WITH TEARS OF JOY: A Natural History of Emoji, available now from all good bookshops.

1.

Emojipedia. “😂 Face With Tears of Joy Emoji”. Accessed October 31, 2025.

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2.

Jones, Daisy. “How the Cry-Laughing Face Became the Most Divisive Emoji in History”. VICE (blog).

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3.

Unicode. “Unicode 6.0.0”.

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4.

Lewis, Darren. “A Picture Is Worth a Thousand Words”. Official Gmail Blog (blog).

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5.

Kim, Arnold. “IPhone 2.2 Includes Hidden Japanese Emoji Icons”. Mac Rumors.

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6.

Chalabi, Mona. “The 100 Most-Used Emojis”. FiveThirtyEight (blog).

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7.

“SwiftKey Emoji Report”. SwiftKey, April 2015.

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8.

Oxford Dictionaries. “Word of the Year 2015”.

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9.

O’Connor, Amy. “The Cry Laughing Emoji Needs to Be Stopped - here’s Why”. The Daily Edge.

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10.

Wilkinson, Abi. “The ‘tears of joy’ emoji is the worst of all – it’s used to gloat about human suffering”. The Guardian, sec. Opinion.

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11.

Yurieff, Kaya. “Sorry, Millennials. The 😂 Emoji isn’t Cool Anymore”. CNN Business.

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In my experience, the same thing has happened to Facebook’s similar ‘😆’ reaction icon. ↢