Smiley

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For other uses, see Smiley (disambiguation).

"Smiley faces" redirects here. For the single by Gnarls Barkley, see Smiley Faces.

The smiley has gone through many incarnations over the years, but it consistently retains the same features.

A smiley is a sketchy representation of a smiling face, most often coloured yellow. (On the Internet, "smiley" often means emoticon.) Used to express happiness. The opposite of a smiley is a frowny.

1 Invention and representation
2 Smileys using computer keys
3 Smileys in popular entertainment
- 3.1 Images
4 See also
5 References
6 External links

[edit] Invention and representation

An early known instance of using two points and a semicircle to represent a smiling (and frowning) face is in a newspaper advertisement in the New York Herald Tribune, March 10, 1953, on page 20, columns 4–6. Promoting the film Lili, starring Leslie Caron, the ad read as follows:

Today

You'll laugh ☺

You'll cry ☹

You'll kiss ♥ Lili

The film opened nationwide, so the ad may have run in many newspapers.^[1]

The happy face, a yellow button with a smile and two dots representing eyes and a half circle representing a mouth, was invented by Harvey Ball in 1963 for a Worcester, Massachusetts, USA, based insurance firm State Mutual Life Assurance. Ball never attempted to use, promote or trademark the image, it fell into the public domain in the United States before that could be accomplished.^[2]

However, Franklin Loufrani of London based company SmileyWorld says he came up with the image in 1971 for a newspaper promotion in which he displayed his icon to highlight good news. He then started developing products using this logo as a brand. The logo and the name are trademarked by Franklin Loufrani across 100 countries for most classes of goods and services. His master licensee Smileyworld is developing products with licensed partners in industries such as clothing, accessories, home textiles, food and confectionery, stationery, toys, gift items, housewares, publishing, fragrances... In 1997 his son Nicolas Loufrani started developing hundreds of variations of the Smiley logo with many different moods and categories such as weather, occupations, countries, animals, objects...He also developed a character based version with a body, arms and legs. They were the first non text based emoticons available to use on the web. As with David Stern of David Stern Inc., a Seattle-based advertising agency also claims to have invented the smiley. Stern reportedly developed his version in 1967 as part of an ad campaign for Washington Mutual, but says he did not think to trademark it.^[3]

The graphic was popularized in the early 1970s by a pair of brothers, Murray and Bernard Spain, who seized upon it in a campaign to sell novelty items. The two produced buttons as well as coffee mugs, t-shirts, bumper stickers and many other items emblazoned with the symbol and the phrase "Have a happy day" (devised by Murray). By 1972 there were an estimated 50 million smiley face buttons throughout the U.S., at which point the fad began to subside.

The smiley was one of the icons adopted by the acid house dance music culture that emerged in the late 1980s. Especially in the UK, the logo was associated to the dance culture underground because it was engraved on the drug Ecstasy and Acid house music.

There have been variations such as reversing the mouth shape to get a sad face. The symbol has been satirized with a smile and three dots (a mutant), and has been reborn as the image of the Microsoft Bob software and Asda & Wal-Mart's "Rolling Back Prices" campaign. In 2006 Wal-Mart sought to trademark the smiley face in the US, coming into legal conflict with Franklin Loufrani and SmileyWorld over the matter.^[4]

The smiley has become a staple of Internet culture, with animated GIF and other image representations, as well as the ubiquitous text-based emoticon, " :) ". The smiley has been used for the printable version of characters 1 and 2 (one "black," the other "white") on the default font on the IBM PC and successor compatible machines, though modern fonts for graphical user interfaces often don't include those characters.

The following Unicode character points are smileys:
☹	0x2639	White Frowning Face
☺	0x263a	White Smiling Face
☻	0x263b	Black Smiling Face

[edit] Smileys using computer keys

Main article: Emoticon

Many, many ASCII representations of smiley faces have been developed over the years:

:-) :) :o) :-$ *<¦:O) XD -_- +_+ ^_^ *_* !_! >_< =_= o_o X_X -_o ;) $_$ <_< >_> o_0 ><_>< ?_? '_' O.O $.$ T.T ._. u.u >-<"

The Wingdings font also includes a smiley:

The reverse smileys, (: have also gained popularity for being a way to avoid having normal :) smileys converted to emoticons in IM programs, such as MSN, or Yahoo etc. More recently, small, in-line graphical images of smiley and other faces have become popular, especially on blogs:

In 1995, KeepTalking, a product of UNET2 Corporation, was one of the first companies to implement a text to graphic smiley system into their chat software, years before it became popular. While their system still runs today, it never caught on or became popular despite its being one of the original places to see smileys.

In modern days, the smiley is often the symbol of humor.

In May 2002, Luke Helder, a midwestern pipe-bomber, tried to replicate a smiley face in his pattern of pipe bombs. His first 16 bombs formed circles, the first in Nebraska and the second on the border between Illinois and Iowa. Those bombs completed the eyes. Two other bombs in Texas and Colorado were apparently the beginnings of the smile. However, he was captured before he completed it.

A certain species of Hawaiian spider, Theridion grallator, AKA the Happyface Spider, has some morphs which display an uncanny smiley-face pattern on its yellow body. Others have patterns that remind of grinning clown faces.

The smallest incarnation of the smiley was created by Paul Rothemund of the California Institute of Technology. He used strands of DNA in a method he calls DNA origami to construct a complex two-dimensional nanostructure in the shape of a smiley face.

[edit] Smileys in popular entertainment

Minesweeper implementation that uses a smiley to reflect the status of the current game.

The film Forrest Gump (Robert Zemeckis, 1994) comically featured the smiley being "invented" when the main character wipes his mud-covered face off with a yellow t-shirt, and says "Have a nice day", inspiring a struggling businessman with the makeshift design. This scene is not in the original book.
The film Fight Club (David Fincher, 1999) has a brief "smiley bombing" scene on the side of an office building. A similar face previously appeared in the Fight Club novel.
The yellow smiley is a recurring theme in the comic book series Watchmen (Alan Moore & David Gibbons, 1986). The smiley is used as an insignia by the character named "The Comedian." An image of a smiley face with a streak of red (originally blood) across it both begins and closes the series, and appears on the cover of the graphic novel reprint.
In the comic book series Transmetropolitan the smiley with three eyes logo features as the symbol of the Transient Movement, a group of humans in the process of morphing their DNA with that of aliens, and was later used as a symbol of the series itself. The 2001 movie Evolution used a similar smiley in promotions a number of years later under license from Smileyworld Ltd.
The first-person shooter game MIDI Maze, 1987 (for the Atari ST) and its follow up Faceball 2000 (for various handhelds and consoles) exclusively used 3D-rendered smileys of various shapes, expressions, and colors as its players and enemies.
In Timescape, an episode of Star Trek: The Next Generation, Captain Jean-Luc Picard drew a smiley face in the cloud created by a warp core breach in progress that was frozen in time and laughed hysterically for a moment before becoming extremely panicked, all as a result of "Temporal Narcosis"
In the computer game Toonstruck, King Hugh has a smiley for head; ball-shaped and yellow with the classic eyes and mouth of a smiley. Also, smilies appear several places in the country of Cutopia, where most of the beginning takes place.
Unet2 Corporation implemented Smileys in their Keeptalking chat system years before they became popular.
"Smileys" is also the name of a gang in the Rockstar video game Manhunt.
In the movie Evolution a smiley face with three eyes is seen in the credits and at the start of the movie.
WWE wrestler Mick Foley's most common logo is a smiley with his trademark Mankind mask over it.
Stephen King's reoccurring villain Randall Flagg often wears a smiley badge.
A smiley can be vaguely seen on the bloodstained medical gurney in the crash scene of Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas.
In the videogame Black and White, the player can tattto and choose the Smiley face as a symbol of their god
In 1986, Eat'n'Park first introduced the "Smiley" cookie.
In The Game Halo on Xbox, the player's character can have a smiley on its clothing.
In Lost, one character landed on the island in a balloon with a smiley face on it.
The popular graffiti artist 'Banksy' has used smileys in several of his works, including one that shows a man in full riot-police gear with a Smiley for a head.
The 'Banksy' riot-police version of the Smiley was used in the graphic novel 'The Smoke'.
In the computer game System Shock, a bullet-ridden smiley can be seen on the hacker protagonist's t-shirt in the opening cinematic.
In the game The Last Smiley on Neopets, the player plays a 3d smiley collecting 2d smiley icons.
On Youtube, there is a video called "The Smiley Intervention," which explains that the number of smileys used in an email, times the number of times you claim to lol when you didn't, divided by the amount of times an exclamation point was used when a period would have sufficed, will equal the amount of cats you would own in Ancient Egypt. However, it is a parody and obviously untrue.^{[citation needed]}
In the computer game Smiley COMMANDOS, Smilies are playing to outsmart each other.
In the 1995 film "Virtuosity" a smiley is used to mark a restuaraunt where the virtual serial killer Sid 6.7 was hiding.
In the 2003 comic Solus a fragment of Danik is named Polla and looks like a talking smiley.
In the 2004 film "Concrete Jungle", one of the main characters is named Joe "Smiley".