The word smiley was used by Franklin Loufrani in France, when he registered his smiley design for trademark while working as a journalist for France Soir in 1971. The smiley accompanied positive news in the newspaper and eventually became the foundation for the licensing operation, The Smiley Company. And although State Mutual briefly produced tens of thousands of badges, it fell to two brothers from Philadelphia to popularise the yellow smiley face with the wider public for the first time.

After rave and grunge had turned the smiley into a symbol of the counter-culture, something new was coming that would affect the way we think about the smiley forever: the internet. Due to the way these codes were implemented, sets of three or more Regional Indicator characters aren't feasible, as text rendering engines will match any two with an emoji first (eg if XSD were used for South Dakota, text engines would render the XS as a Scottish flag first, and be left with the D hanging at the end) As The Guardian's Jon Savage wrote in 2009, the smiley became a recognised part of the history of pop culture in the early 2000s when the Janus-faced sign "became a shorthand for the high 1970s, referenced in that great touchstone of modern history, Forrest Gump, where Tom Hanks's mud-spattered T-shirt provides the origin for the design". a b Honan, William H. (14 April 2001). "H. R. Ball, 79, Ad Executive Credited With happy Face". The New York Times . Retrieved 29 August 2009.For thousands of years, smiling faces have been used as ideograms and as pictograms. The oldest known smiling face was found by a team of archaeologists led by Nicolò Marchetti of the University of Bologna. Marchetti and his team pieced together fragments of a Hittite pot from approximately 1700 BC that had been found in Karkamış, Turkey. Once the pot had been pieced together, the team noticed that the item had a large smiling face engraved on it, becoming the first item with such a design to be found. [8] Flag like this (and 🚩) were generally added to Unicode for compatibility with the Japanese carrier emoji sets, or other pre-emoji fonts such as Webdings. For the 50th birthday of the Smiley, Galeries Lafayette in Paris, Beijing and Shanghai and 10 Nordstrom department stores sold limited edition smiley products to commemorate the anniversary. [53] During the same year, Lee Jeans announced the launch of a new clothing collection, Lee x Smiley. [54] Gaming [ edit ] In 2022, the International Day of Happiness was celebrated by projecting a smiley onto a number of landmarks around the globe. In Seoul, South Korea, a smiley celebrating happiness was projected onto The Seoul Tower. [59] Ownership and alternative smileys [ edit ]

This is a clever system that avoids Unicode needing to create a new code point for every country. The United States flag is a sequence of these two characters:If the ISO 3166-1 standard was updated to add a new country tomorrow, that would almost certainly end up on the emoji flag list. Aside: "Made Up" ISO 31661- codes There are multiple options for this flag currently used in various regions, so vendors may also want to be sure that a single design is representative of a community internationally, rather than have split views on which design to show for one emoji. TL;DR: How Flags are Assessed

Appearing on the emoji keyboard of any major platform is a sign of legitimacy. Why people want to see their flag as an emoji is clear. Determining the exact set of flags - or any category of emojis - to include on every device in the world is less clear. Now famous for his distortion of widely recognised brands and icons, Banksy started painting riot police and soldiers with smiley faces in 2003, a juxtaposition that, drawing on the sign’s long history, carries a message that is simultaneously comic and profoundly political. By 1972, the Spain brothers had produced an estimated 50 million pin badges and a smiley logo that was slightly more refined than Ball’s hand-drawn original, with even, oval eyes and a smoother, semicircular smile. The image became inextricably associated with the zeitgeist of early-1970s America. Above: A Texas Flag emoji shown on the WhatsApp for Android emoji keyboard. Photo: Jeremy Burge / Emojipedia. As music genres began to create their own cultures from the 1970s onwards, many cultures began to incorporate a smiling face into their culture. In the late 1970s, the American band Dead Kennedys launched their first recording, " California über alles". The single cover was a collage aimed to look like that of a Nazi rally prior to World War II. It featured three of the vertical banners commonly used at such rallies, but with the usual swastikas replaced by large smileys. [42] In the UK, the happy face has been associated with psychedelic culture since Ubi Dwyer and the Windsor Free Festival in the 1970s and the electronic dance music culture, particularly with acid house, that emerged during the Second Summer of Love in the late 1980s. The association was cemented when the band Bomb the Bass used an extracted smiley from the comic book series Watchmen on the center of its " Beat Dis" hit single.

What deeper cultural meaning can we take from the smiley in 2018, if any? With no "third summer of love" on the horizon and an unsettling amount of geopolitical turbulence in the world, perhaps there's more a sense of "just grin and bear it" to be found in today's smiley. Cherman for one, however, still believes in the icon's power as a source of joy, even when things get bad. After all, life is never perfect — and we're talking about an icon born during the depths of the Cold War and Vietnam, designed the same year President John F. Kennedy was assassinated. FABRIC: Colourfast treated polyester flag combines excellent durability with a low cost and attractive appearance offering outstanding value and looks great both outdoors and indoors and flies with very little wind. Best suited to indoors with occasional use outdoors. Prolong the life of a flag by bringing inside each evening. Don’t put up in bad weather and mend the hems when start to fray. Vittel announced in 2017 that they would be using the smiley on a special edition design of its water bottles. AdAge referred to its use as a "feel-good effect" and water bottles using the smiley icon had an 11.8% increase in sales, compared to the standard bottles, with 128 million bottles sold across Europe which featured the smiley-design. [47]