What 😄 means
😄 is the grinning face with smiling eyes emoji, filed under Smileys & Emotion in the face-smiling subgroup of the Unicode emoji index.
It was added in Emoji 0.6 (2010) and the underlying characters entered Unicode in version 6.0 (2010).
How it is encoded
😄 is a single code point, U+1F604.
It is RGI (recommended for general interchange), so every major platform ships artwork for it.
Safe in any thread: boss, group chat, crush. Worst case, you seem sunny.
Don't confuse it with
3😃😁😊
Grinning Face With Big Eyes
Same open grin, but eyes wide open: reads more excited, less warm. The eyes are the tell.
Beaming Face With Smiling Eyes
Same smiling eyes, more teeth. In a 2024 German experiment with WhatsApp-style messages, people picked 😁 for a big win and 😄 for amusing news.
Smiling Face With Smiling Eyes
Closed mouth and blushing calm: quiet contentment, not out-loud delight.
Worth knowing
- In Slack and Discord, :smile: inserts 😄 as of 2026, a bigger grin than the word promises; the milder face is :slightly_smiling_face:.
- It began as a Japanese phone emoji: J-Phone, the carrier later renamed SoftBank, carried this grin by 2000, before Unicode encoded the carriers' separate emoji as shared characters.
Questions people ask
1Can 😄 be sarcastic?
Rarely. The passive-aggressive reputation belongs to 🙂's tight little smile; this open grin reads straight. If it lands oddly, it is softening the message, not jabbing.
How to type 😄
Windows
Win+.Open the emoji picker and search “grinning face with smiling eyes”.
macOS
Control+Command+Spaceopens the character viewer.
iOS / Android
Emoji keyboard → search “grinning face with smiling eyes”.
Chat apps
:smile:the common shortcode; support varies by platform.HTML
😄Codes and encoding1 code points
HTML decimal
😄
HTML hex
😄
CSS content
content: "\1F604";
Each escape is closed by the next backslash; a trailing space is needed before a literal hex digit.
URL encoded
%F0%9F%98%84
1
On screen
1
Code points
2
JS .length
4
UTF-8 bytes
A visible symbol can contain several code points. JS .length counts UTF-16 units; UTF-8 counts bytes.