A laughing, genuinely happy grin. The squinted, smiling eyes add warmth, so it reads as real joy rather than a polite smile.
People send it after a funny line, a nice surprise or a fun plan coming together. It sits between a smile and outright laughter; for something truly hilarious, most people move up to ๐ or ๐คฃ.
Facts
Grinning face with smiling eyes ๐ is an emoji in the smileys and emotion category, under face smiling. It is one of the early emoji from Japanese phones, standardized in Unicode 6.0 (2010). On GitHub, Slack and other apps you can type it as :smile: or :grinning_face_with_smiling_eyes:. People also look for it with words like โeyeโ, โeyesโ, โfaceโ, or โgrinโ.
Timeline
2010Added to the emoji standard (Unicode 6.0)
Design history
Google (Noto)
2015
2017
2020
2026
Twemoji (X, Discord)
2014
2016
Google Noto Emoji images: Apache 2.0. Twemoji graphics by X Corp and contributors: CC-BY 4.0.