The 😂 Face with Tears of Joy emoji is, by every measure ever taken, the most-used emoji on the internet. It's been #1 worldwide for over a decade. Oxford Dictionaries crowned it Word of the Year in 2015 (yes, really — an emoji was their word of the year). And yet, Gen Z is increasingly convinced that using 😂 makes you sound like a middle-aged person. Here's the full picture.
The basic meaning
😂 depicts a yellow face with its mouth wide open in laughter, eyes squeezed shut, and two large tears streaming down the cheeks. The name is "Face with Tears of Joy" — laughing so hard you're actually crying.
It was added to Unicode in version 6.0 (2010), in the first major emoji release after Apple added emoji support to the iPhone for Western users. The combination of early availability, instant visual recognition ("that means laughing, got it"), and cross-platform consistency made it the default LOL emoji in the English-speaking world within a year or two.
How dominant is 😂 really?
Almost impossible to overstate. A few data points:
- Unicode frequency data (which tracks how often emoji are used in the data it sees): 😂 has been #1 every year since the metric started, often by a 2x margin over #2.
- Oxford Word of the Year 2015: the first time an emoji took the title. The Oxford selection panel noted that 😂 accounted for roughly 20% of all emoji usage on UK-based social platforms that year.
- Twitter / X analyses have shown 😂 representing 5-10% of all emoji use across the English-speaking internet, consistently.
- WhatsApp's own blog posts about sticker/emoji usage list 😂 as the single most-sent emoji worldwide.
For context: "the second-most-used emoji" (usually ❤️ or 😭) still gets sent billions of times per day. 😂 gets sent more than them. By a lot.
The "😂 is cringe" discourse
Here's where things get interesting. Starting around 2020, Gen Z (roughly under-25 at the time) began collectively branding 😂 as "a millennial emoji." The argument:
- 😂 feels over-used — every HR email, every work Slack, every Boomer Facebook comment.
- The literal "tears" feel performative — "you're not actually crying, stop overselling it."
- The yellow face aesthetic feels dated compared to newer, subtler Gen Z emoji like 💀, 😭, 🥺, or 🫠.
The Gen Z replacement: 💀 (skull) for "I'm dead" (dying of laughter), or 😭 (loudly crying) for "crying because this is funny." Both carry the laughter-through-tears energy without the perceived uncoolness of 😂.
Is it actually cringe to use 😂? Depends entirely on your audience. If you're texting a friend over 30, 😂 is completely normal. If you're commenting on a TikTok video, you'll often see replies like "the 😂 is sending me" — sarcastic call-out of the emoji choice. Most creators don't care; some Gen Z circles make it a joke. Millennials largely continue to use 😂 proudly, and they're not wrong.
How 😂 renders on different platforms
- Apple (iOS / macOS): orange-yellow gradient, tilted right, open mouth, two large tears streaming. The "canonical" rendering most people have in mind.
- Google (Android, Gmail): flatter yellow, more exaggerated tears, slightly different mouth shape.
- Samsung (One UI): darker gold-yellow, wider open mouth, more cartoon-looking eyes.
- Microsoft (Windows, Outlook): 3D-gradient face, sometimes with a blue-tinged tear — slightly colder rendering.
- Twitter / X (Twemoji): the cleanest, most widely-copied rendering; used by most small platforms that don't ship their own emoji set.
- WhatsApp: close to Apple but slightly warmer tone.
Historically, pre-2017 Android's 😂 was noticeably uglier than the iOS version, which led to years of "iPhone users vs Android users" emoji memes. Google's modern rendering (since Android 8) closed the gap.
Similar emojis worth knowing
- 🤣 Rolling on the Floor Laughing — more extreme than 😂. Added Unicode 9.0 (2016), tilted sideways, "ROFL" energy.
- 😭 Loudly Crying Face — ostensibly sad, but Gen Z uses it for "crying from laughter" just as often.
- 💀 Skull — "I'm dead" = dying of laughter. The Gen Z successor to 😂.
- 😅 Grinning Face with Sweat — "awkward laugh" / "that was close" — lower intensity than 😂.
- 😆 Grinning Squinting Face — just laughing hard, without the tears.
Using 😂 as a website favicon
😂 is a natural fit for comedy blogs, meme aggregators, joke-of-the-day apps, and any community site where "this is funny" is the core vibe. Copy this line into your HTML:
<link rel="icon" href="https://emojifavicons.com/face-with-tears-of-joy">Loads as SVG in under 200 bytes. The full Face with Tears of Joy favicon page supports shape, background, and animation options.
Takeaway
😂 is the Most Used Emoji on the Internet — not close second, not tied for first, just the most. It means "laughing so hard I'm crying." Millennials use it freely; Gen Z has softly branded it as "older people's emoji" and moved to 💀 or 😭 as their go-to laughter markers. Both camps are right for their context. If you're over 25, keep using 😂. If you're under 25 and posting to peers, 💀 lands better.