Where the smiley face comes from
The text smileys ☺︎ WHITE SMILING FACE and ☻ BLACK SMILING FACE were characters 1 and 2 of the original IBM PC character set (code page 437) in 1981. That is why, on Windows, Alt + 1 and Alt + 2 on the number pad still type them.
The yellow smiley itself is older: graphic artist Harvey Ball designed it in 1963 for an insurance company in Worcester, Massachusetts. The typed emoticon :-) followed in 1982, when computer scientist Scott Fahlman suggested it on a Carnegie Mellon University message board. Emoji smileys came later; 🙂 SLIGHTLY SMILING FACE joined Unicode in 2014.
Text smileys vs emoji
☺︎ and ☻ are text characters that take the color of your writing, though some phones show ☺︎ as a colorful emoji. ツ is the Japanese katakana letter tsu, famous from the shrug, and シ (shi) and ッ (small tsu) look similar. ㋡ is a circled katakana tu, a ready-made smiley in a circle, and 〠 is the POSTAL MARK FACE, a face drawn from the Japanese postal mark 〒.
Emoji smileys such as 🙂 😊 😀 are colored pictures that look a little different on each platform. Use text smileys when you want something small and neutral, and emoji when you want color and expression. Need tiny ones? See the small smiley face symbol page.
How to type a smiley face
On Windows, hold Alt and type 1 on the number pad for ☺︎ or 2 for ☻, and press Win + . (period) for emoji smileys. On a Mac, press Control + Command + Space and search for "smiling". On phones, use the emoji keyboard.
In Microsoft Word, 263A followed by Alt + X gives ☺︎. Some chat apps, including Discord, can turn typed emoticons like :) into emoji automatically. For more faces, browse kaomoji, or see the opposite mood on the sad face symbol page.