Smiling Face With Tear Emoji

What does the Smiling Face With Tear emoji mean?

The Smiling Face With Tear emoji (🥲) depicts a smiling face with tear and belongs to the Smileys & Emotion category of the Unicode emoji standard. It is a widely recognised symbol that works across modern devices and platforms. Unicode maps this character to U+1F972 and it first shipped in Emoji 13.1 (2021). The code point ensures the same underlying meaning even though visual art varies by vendor. Because tone is hard to convey in plain text, this emoji functions as digital body language. It is often paired with greetings, apologies, thanks, or reactions to add empathy and reduce friction in fast-moving conversations. On Apple, Google, Samsung, Microsoft and other vendors the artwork differs slightly — colour palette, shading, and line weight change — but the core concept of smiling face with tear stays identical, so the emoji remains universally readable. You can copy this emoji as the character itself (🥲), as an HTML entity (🥲), or as a shortcode (:smiling-face-with-tear:) for platforms like Slack, Discord, and GitHub.

This detailed meaning was written by the UseEmoji editorial team after reviewing Unicode CLDR data and real-world usage. For quick identification, think of this emoji as shorthand for smiling face with tear — it conveys that idea faster than words while keeping the message friendly and scannable.

How to use the Smiling Face With Tear emoji

• In chat: Drop 🥲 into a sentence where you would normally write “smiling face with tear” to add tone and visual interest.
• On social media: Pair 🥲 with a keyword or hashtag to make captions more searchable and expressive.
• In documents and code: Use the HTML entity 🥲 or shortcode :smiling-face-with-tear: when the raw character may be escaped or unsupported.

Technical details & cross-platform notes

Related emojis