Talk:Smiley

I am an old woman, born in 1943. I can provide you my birth certificate. A supposedly "encyclopedic" article is alleging that something (a smiley face) did not appear in American culture until a decade after my birth, when I possess evidence that not only did it exist in my childhood, it existed in my mother's (she was born in 1916). This absolutely violates my lived experience, and the lived experience of others my age and older. You should strongly encourage the participation of the few older people in who are trying to participate in the Wikipedia project who actually have the lived experience and personal knowledge of these topics to contribute to them meaningfully. You're being ageist and non-encyclopedic, and it's past time for a class action lawsuit -- not just by older people around the world, but by users around the world. You should also make it easier for elderly people (and people who aren't experts in coding and markup language) to suggest improvements to articles. This is an evil organization and is vastly contributing to worldwide ignorance, on the largest scale of anything ever produced or published.

Please, before you just block and punish me again, tell me where I can place or voice these complaints. — Preceding unsigned comment added by 138.88.43.77 (talk) 19:51, 7 January 2025 (UTC)

Smileys are a complex subject, I've spent years trying to make sense of it all with emojis, emoticons, Japanese emoticon, smileys. Then happy faces and other inventions, not to mention all the cave drawings and attempts to communicate using smiling faces. The reality is someone didn't draw a smiling face in 1970 for the first time. But there were lots of reasons the smiley exists as it does today that began well after 1943. For example, the NY radio stations use of yellow in the late 60s played a massive role in the use of the colour yellow. If you want to contribute then please do, but this isn't about how you can remember things, on Wikipedia everything needs to be accurately referenced to keep accuracy high.FelixFLB (talk) 10:44, 9 January 2025 (UTC)

The iconic yellow smiley face is, as you say, a product of a specific era (the 1960s, perhaps, though it was most popular in the '70s and is famously associated with that decade).

A children's doodle of a smiling face with a curved line and two dots existed well before my time, and, again, I was born in 1943. It was definitely as omnipresent in my own childhood as in childhoods today. It's preposterous that anyone would suggest otherwise, and having to argue this honestly makes me feel like I'm trapped in an episode of the Twilight Zone. 138.88.43.77 (talk) 21:22, 11 January 2025 (UTC)

You're conflating things that shouldn't be conflated, and aren't the same thing. A doodle of a smiling face. The iconic yellow smiley face of the 1960s or '70s. Emoticons. Japanese emoticons. Emojis. The first is infinitely older than the rest. 138.88.43.77 (talk) 21:25, 11 January 2025 (UTC)

We didn't have the internet to put our scribbles onto, but I assure you if you saw a page of them they'd be indistinguishable from a kid's today. (With a few very unusual exceptions - a drawing of a computer, for instance.) Your problem is you're looking for professional published work, which ended up being scanned and put on the internet decades later. It's all going to be actual cartoon and comic strip characters (or a professional artist's work of some kind - an, like the rest, now bearing very commercial, "dated"-looking hallmarks of whatever era it came from), with more than a circle for a head, a curved line for a mouth, and two dots for eyes, but that doesn't mean people [especially kids, but even adults - in the margins of letters, etc.] weren't drawing a basic smiling face doodle back then! 138.88.43.77 (talk) 21:38, 11 January 2025 (UTC)

This is frustrating to me. I do feel like I'm in a Twilight Zone episode. Wait until you're older and have to argue that people used toilet paper to wipe themselves in the 2010s. 138.88.43.77 (talk) 21:39, 11 January 2025 (UTC)

Some points are valid, I have always disliked the early history of the smiley on this page because as you say two dots and a line for a face can be traced back thousands of years. It would be impossible to document everyone in that period who felt a bit creative and ended a letter in the 1600s for example with :) . That squiggle as you call it is also very different from now with emoticons and a more common design template on which many smileys are based. If you want to do some research into just how common "squiggles" were in western text prior to the 50s/60s as you suggest, someone might have looked into it, somewhere in the depths of the Internet.FelixFLB (talk) 13:51, 13 January 2025 (UTC)

I didn't mention a "squiggle." What is it? 138.88.43.236 (talk) 18:51, 17 January 2025 (UTC)

And when I mentioned a smiley face in the margins of a letter, I was speaking about my own early years (or even my mother's time) -- not the 1600s. I know the 1600s and the 1940s feel approximately the same to someone very young, but they're not. 138.88.43.236 (talk) 18:53, 17 January 2025 (UTC)

I recently added a 1972 Morehead News article that traces smiley buttons to the 1963 'Smile Power' campaign by two insurance companies. The source quotes company president John Adam Jr. on the purpose of distributing the buttons and the choice not to trademark the design.

This addition provides clear, contemporary evidence of the insurance companies' role and identifies the "two affiliated insurance companies" reported in the 1971 Associated Press wire photo. I linked both the 1971 AP coverage and the brand-name history to the same citation for consistency.

Reference: I cited Where Did 'Smiley' Come From? — Morehead News (Sept. 7, 1972), p. 11,(https://www.newspapers.com/article/morehead-news-where-did-smiley-come/155482637/ ) via Newspapers.com, to substantiate the insurance companies' early use of smiley buttons and provide a direct account from their president on the purpose and decision not to trademark the smiley.-- Bayoustarwatch (talk) 16:07, 25 August 2025 (UTC)

I removed two statements from the "Digital evolution of the smiley" section:

• The claim that Alcatel included a digital smiley as a welcome screen in 1996.
• The claim that the SmileyWorld toolbar contained "887 icons by 2003."

Both of these were supported only by promotional material from The Smiley Company (primary/self-published source) and lacked independent, secondary verification. Per WP:RS and WP:V, such claims should not be presented as fact without reliable sourcing. If independent sources are found in the future, the material can be restored with proper attribution. ---Bayoustarwatch (talk) 12:25, 26 August 2025 (UTC)

What does the following sentence (in section "As a brand name") mean?:
"The Spain Brothers used the slogan "Have a nice day," which is now more frequently associated with the smiley face rather than the slogan itself."--Geke (talk) 06:40, 20 October 2025 (UTC)

Yeah, this section (and honestly most of the article) feels like a lot of original research. There’s way too much about random uses of smiling faces, poems mentioning “smiling,” and stuff about the surname, which really have nothing to do with the Smiley logo. Other articles don’t do this. Google doesn’t go into detail about the number, Amazon doesn’t talk about the rainforest beyond a short note, and Mickey Mouse doesn’t list every time someone drew a mouse, or when Nike's slogan Just Do It was written in text for the first time.81.97.113.131 (talk) 19:07, 29 October 2025 (UTC)

The smiley face is NOT like Google, Amazon, the online, the Nike Swoosh, Mickey Mouse, Hello Kitty, or Garfield, which have known creators and creation dates. There is debate over the origin of the "smiley face." Franklin Loufrani said "A prehistoric man probably invented the smiley face in some cave, but I certainly was the first to register it as a trademark" (Wal-Mart fights to keep the smiley face: Retail giant says symbol personifies its price-reducing policy, but London-based firm says it secured rights years ago.(CNN)July 5 2006) The word "smiley" the ideogram are link. " In 2023, the Smiley company filed SAD lawsuits in the United States District Court for the Southern District of Florida against hundreds of small businesses operating on the Etsy and other online platforms, claiming copyright infringement for use of the word smiley in sales listings and demanding settlements of $2,500 USD each. The lawsuit was ultimately dropped after the businesses hired a collective lawyer." (https://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=The_Smiley_Company&oldid=1315736832) ---Bayoustarwatch (talk) 16:00, 31 October 2025 (UTC)

i assume the simple smiley face also appears in other cultures?? ~2026-10868-20 (talk) 11:09, 18 February 2026 (UTC)

They have! However, the yellow and black smiley face has seemingly been popularized from america. ~2026-18291-08 (talk) 18:34, 23 March 2026 (UTC)