History of Kawaii Smileys

In 1986, Japanese users began using a particular kind emoticon. Known as the kaomoji, early internet practitioners in Japan didn’t think that one should have to tilt their heads to the left to see what emotion someone was trying to portray. Most of the time, they weren’t really cute — because characters were limited, you’d often only see stuff like (*_*) and other dead-looking faces. The use of asterisks as eyes was, though, particularly different from the internet standard at the time (the standard :-) face). Later, when individuals actually wanted to get across a dead guy, they’d use “X”‘s, like in the case of this face: X_X.

After some time, people began to get more creative with portraying what they wanted with a horizontal face. Dashes were given to show contempt (-_-) or sleepiness [combined, we get “unimpressed”]. Similar to the ‘mushroom-butt cheek’ in anime, using /// gave a feeling of blushing. Sometimes, in certain anime, one can see the artist actually draw three lines onto the face of the subject. This is an example of one media following another! Who would have ever thought that something as simple as little kawaii text faces would have so much cultural sway?

Different ASCII techniques came into existence, and suddenly the world began seeing things like braces {^_^} and carrots >o< . An apostrophe is often used to portray a sweat drop, like in (^_^'), similar to its anime roots. This time around, kawaii smileys followed anime as a medium. The Western (English-speaking) world had really caught on by this point! As instant messaging became very popular, "hug" emoticons like (>^^)> started to rocket in popularity. These kinds of characters became known as “kirbys,” an ode to Nintendo’s lush, pink, and oh-so-squish-able mascot. Also around this time, the emoticon expanded from base emotions into portraying gesticulations too. t(o_ot), for example, was used as a way to show the middle finger — it essentially meant “f**k off!” Also, we began to see ‘vampire’ compositions that used commas and periods as ‘snake eyes’ and ‘fangs’ (i.e. ;..;).

With time and more ASCII additions, people began to mix languages to make emoticons that could portray things never before seen online. For example, the small “wa” in this character: ôヮô and the accented “o”‘s hail from both Finnish and Japanese. Once more language packs became more available to everyone, we began to see really interesting results. Brazilians, for example, figured out that accent marks could be used a wide range of “eyebrow” emotions, like ò_ó or ó_ò. The simple tilt of the slant above the accented “o” serves to create an entirely opposite effect. More obscure languages, like Kannada, allowed for unexpected and particularly specific emotional portrayals. This character’s eyes were made from Kannada letters: ಠ_ಠ. It often is used to portray disapproval.

Once Westerners had a mastery of the Japanese smileys and the Japanese had a good grasp on the Western smileys, we began to see rich opportunities for even more creative masterpieces. Parenthesis were often dropped altogether in the style of the new ‘international’ mixtures. Here, the long face (^_________________^) using lots of underscores was born. This was namely used on blogs and in IM chat rooms to emphasize that one was “really happy” (or, in the opposite context, really bored or really sad). Because these emoticons take up so much more space than usual, they are often regarded as more “spammy” than their counterparts.

Today, people are wildly creative with their creations. And as new languages with new symbols are beginning to populate the internet, we will only see cooler and more creative smileys! This website is the place to find them. If you spot a face that I have not included, please submit it using the email link above. Also, try to make some emoticons on your own; who knows, you just might come up with the next ( ͡° ͜ʖ ͡°) that has every forum and comments section laughing. Thanks for all the love and support!

I made this site because the blogs or other places where you can normally find kawaii emoticons or smileys for free are too cluttered and unorganized. There are even places out there that will try to charge you money for them! I think that’s dumb. If you find any more good smileys, or if you want to reach out to me for any other reason (comments, suggestions, etc.), you can email me here. It might take me a while to respond because I don’t check this site all too often! Please feel free to share this page with anyone who would like it. Thanks! xoxo