But apparently, this was a mistake, and when I thought I was expressing sincere happiness, I was actually sending an emoji that’s “colossally insulting in every conceivable way,” according to The Guardian.
It seems the rest of the world agrees, and the “slightly smiling face,” to use its full name, doesn’t feature in the top 10 of the most used emoji in 2021.
Instead of embracing the subtle joys of the slightly smiling face, the world has continued its love affair with “face with tears of joy,” a crass, blunt instrument of an emoji that leaves no room for subtlety or ambiguity.
Jokes aside, it’s interesting to see from this data how broadly consistent the emoji we use has been, even as the world has been turned upside down by the pandemic.
But surprisingly, actual pandemic-related emoji haven’t seen much of a change, like the microbe emoji, which barely made it into the top 500 .
Beyond this sort of data being just plain interesting, it’s useful for the Unicode Consortium to understand which emoji are most popular as it decides which characters to add next.
The emoji saw a pretty dramatic increase in popularity between 2019 and 2021, where it previously sat down at the 50th mark.