Smiley

A smiley, sometimes referred to as a smiley face, is a basic ideogram representing a smiling face. Since the 1950s it has become part of popular culture worldwide, used either as a standalone ideogram or as a form of communication, such as emoticons. The smiley began as two dots and a parenthesis to represent eyes and a mouth.

The first known mention on the Internet was on 19 September 1982. In a posting made to a Carnegie Mellon bulletin board, Professor Scott Fahlman proposes the first known use of smiley. While the use of emoticons became widespread during the 80’s and 90’s, their origin remained unknown until September 10, 2002, when the original message was retrieved from backup tape, which is displayed below.

19-Sep-82 11:44 Scott E Fahlman             :‌-)
From: Scott E Fahlman <Fahlman at Cmu-20c>

I propose that the following character sequence for joke markers:

:‌-)

Read it sideways. Actually, it is probably more economical to mark
things that are NOT jokes, given current trends. For this, use

:‌-(

The smiley face was included in Unicode's Miscellaneous Symbols from version 1.1 (1993).
Unicode smiley characters:

☺	U+263A	Alt+1	White Smiling Face (This may appear as an emoji on some devices)
☻	U+263B	Alt+2	Black Smiling Face

Later additions to Unicode included a large number of variants expressing a range of human emotions, in particular with the addition of the "Emoticons" and "Supplemental Symbols and Pictographs blocks in Unicode versions 6.0 (2010) and 8.0 (2015), respectively.