Face with Tears of Joy: A Natural History of Emoji

by Keith Houston

A vibrant exploration of the world’s newest language—where it came from, how it works, and where it’s going.

We are surrounded by emoji. They appear in politics, movies, drug deals, our sex lives, and more. But emoji’s impact has never been explored in full. In this rollicking tech and pop culture history, Keith Houston follows emoji from its birth in 1990s Japan, traces its Western explosion in the 2000s, and considers emoji’s ever-expanding lexicon. Named for the world’s most popular pictogram, Face with Tears of Joy tells the whole story of emoji for the first time.

Genres: Nonfiction, History, Technology, Language, Linguistics, Writing

288 pages, Paperback

Published July 1, 2025

About the author

Keith Houston is the author of Shady Characters, The Book, Empire of the Sum and Face with Tears of Joy. His writing has appeared in the New York Times, the Wall Street Journal, the Financial Times, Lapham's Quarterly, BBC Culture, and on Time.com. He lives in Linlithgow, Scotland, with his family.

Reviews

[Sam Orenstein · Rating 5 out of 5]

perfectly paced history of the emoji with plenty of detail. answers every question you have about emoji (is emoji language? who decides new emoji? where did emoji come from?). fast and easy read with lots of fun facts that your friends may or may not enjoy.

[CatReader · Rating 4 out of 5]

Keith Houston is a Scottish writer who's published several nonfiction books on esoteric aspects of numbers and punctuation (see Shady Characters: The Secret Life of Punctuation, Symbols & Other Typographical Marks and Empire of the Sum: The Rise and Reign of the Pocket Calculator); his latest addition to this niche collection is 2025's deep dive into the history of emoji, Faces with Tears of Joy.

This was a fun, very well-researched book. I read the Ebook, where thankfully almost all the emoji therein were rendered appropriately by my Kindle app -- though tragically none of my highlights crossed over into my linked Goodreads account. As I suspected, emojis have been around for a lot longer than this century, and while the first example of emoji in a digital format is hard to definitively pin down (there were many examples in Japan dating back to the 1970s and 1980s), it was interesting to learn about all the iterations of emoji, their requirements for interoperability (being rendered similarly regardless of device/operating system), as well as the governing standard that still regulates them, Unicode. As of September 2025 when I'm writing this review, the most recent emoji update is Unicode version 17.0. Personally, I'm still partial to the pre-smartphone era emoticons of my teen years rendered by keyboard strokes, like ¯\_(ツ)_/¯-- to me, it has a charm that Unicode version, U+1F937, lacks.

Now I'm just waiting on the related book (though it may already exist, or maybe Houston's working on it now!) on the etiology and cross-cultural significance of digital textspeak ;).

Further reading:
The Signals Are Talking: Why Today’s Fringe Is Tomorrow’s Mainstream by Amy Webb

My statistics:
Book 290 for 2025
Book 2216 cumulatively
My statistics:
Book for 2025
Book cumulatively

[Alex Bielovich · Rating 5 out of 5]

Reading this on my Kindle (monochrome dot-pixels and all) felt especially appropriate. A really comprehensive dive into a design and language culture we all participate in everyday, and often take for granted. As a designer who’s designed sets of icons and symbols, I have a special appreciation for these little things. 🔎

[Briann · Rating 2 out of 5]

Face with Tears of Joy opened with a messy and confusing Chapter 1. This chapter did not go in chronological order. Rather, the author kept skipping around from different years and companies. While the book had many interesting points, it overall read as very dull and boring. It was not as engaging as I would have liked.

[Kendell Timmers · Rating 5 out of 5]

Single-sitting read that is fun and informative!

[Tetiana · Rating 4 out of 5]

This was interesting 🙂 got some insights about how Unicode works, how those people handle emoji. Also we learn a lot about emoji history, how they evolved, and how people use them. 🙃

[Kameko Leung · Rating 3 out of 5]

I now know more about emoji than anyone not writing a research paper on them ever should. Useful for historical context? Yes. Well written? Yes. Worthwhile read for anyone who doesn’t have an academic or obsessive interest in this topic? Definitely no.

[Patrick Kelly · Rating 5 out of 5]

Emoji

This is a fascinating book. Similar to the previous book about the history of books, there was very little that I knew. I was learning on every page.

A central theme of this book is the unified code consortium. A technical organization that seems to control the code of language used on the internet. They are the organization that creates the 1 0 code of keyboards and emoji? I don’t really understand it but they control what is and is not an emoji. They control keyboards

This book was validating;
- Emoji have become too sexual
- We need greater diversity for emoji
- Emoji are fun

Topics covered:
- Is emoji a language or script - neither
- Does it follow some standards of punctuation - not entirely
- The unified code is why no brands have emoji but a sticker and hashtag is not an emoji
- The fight for diversity
- Crime and hate speech
- Translating Moby Dick
- Gender and race were a huge topic of controversy - the unified code made the right choices in the end
- It’s emoji not emojis
- They are defined by meaning not appearance
- What flags are allowed. The Taiwan 🇹🇼 flag is blocked on Chinese devices
- They have moved towards quality and less quantity
- The tech companies hold incredible power. They can withhold emoji but it is far harder for them to add emoji
- Mammals and flags are some of the least used
- The custom ones on Slack must be stickers instead of actual emoji

Just like the previous book, there is so much information. I know that I am forgetting a ton.

I would love to read the punctuation book

I want more emoji. Emoji are fun and cute, I love them.

🫀🧠🦿💪🦸🧑‍🎄🧙🧞🤦🤷🏻🪼🐕‍🦺🐙🦦🐦‍🔥🦔🌻🌷🪷🍑🍒🥭🍍🍬🍭🍮🪃🏂🏊‍♂️🧘🧬🧪🩵💙💜🩷

[Fanchen Bao · Rating 4 out of 5]

This is a delightful quick read of the emoji's history.

One of the most fascinating aspects is that emoji's success is heavily dependent on the Unicode Consortium, which holds absolute authority on emoji and serves more or less as a benevolent dictator. Well, technically, it is an oligarchy. The decisions are made by a handful of unelected people (most of them paid their way in) after debate, negotiation, compromise, and balance of the ever swinging public opinion.

Without a doubt, had emoji not been controlled by the Consortium or had the idea of full customization been adopted, emoji would probably have turned into a cesspool -- it is simply impossible to make everybody happen everywhere all the time. Someone has to put the foot down; someone has to be the adult in the room, setting the rules and standards so that the rest of us can actually have some fun, if not too much fun. That someone is the Consortium, the oligarchy.

So thus I wonder, is it human nature that we can only enjoy good things if an iron fist decides what is permissible and what is not? Is this why religion exists, so that we can have an omnipotent being or karma ruling us over? Is this why authoritarianism is such a magnet that whenever a person has a lapse in judgement, they get sucked into the fantasy of being told what to do? The history of emoji itself might be a lighthearted journey of how those endearing symbols come into being, but deeply, I think, it paints a vivid picture of one aspect of human nature.

[Jonathan Dunkle · Rating 4 out of 5]

As a middle-aged curmudgeon and a technocynic, receiving a copy of this book felt a little bit as if it were a gag gift. Why would I, a user of rolltop desks and postcards, possibly want to read about emojis?

Taken by the design and construction of the book - a really beautiful book published by W.W. Norton with tons of color via the numerous emojis and pictures depicted, lovely smiley-face yellow page numbers, high-quality paper, and an excellent choice of font (whatever it is) - I started reading.

The author, Keith Houston, took over from there. He details the history of emojis, how new ones come about, the societal impact of them, and more. Endnotes abound along with some asides from Houston in the form of footnotes. I found it incredibly interesting, despite detesting the very existence of emoji. I give it a thumbs up emoji and a smiley-face.

[Martin · Rating 4 out of 5]

As the author of The Emoji Haggadah, this is required reading for me - and I'm thrilled I did read it!

Houston gives an excellent history, leaving (almost) no stones unturned. Several revelations abound, including the emoji-on-your-phone process, and its evolution and progress. Most revealing is that there's nothing new under the sun. Emojis are older than you think, in the past and in the modern age. The details are fascinating.

As for my "almost" comment above, well, the author really does cover everything, except for one thing: my book. Still the only book ever fully written using an extant emoji set. I'm taking off a whole star just for that. Once my book appears in the emoji timeline at the end of the book, I'll be happy to add the star.

Let's make a deal.

[Alan Zhu · Rating 3 out of 5]

Solid read; I wished it was a tad bit more technical, but I suppose that I am in a niche audience here. I think it's interesting to consider the portions of human communication that are in-band (i.e. speech, language) and out-of-band (body language, tone, etc.) and how emoji straddles that boundary, and I think it's also a fascinating case study of how we codify the behavior of our society into formalisms and standards...

Nothing spectacular, but worth a go if you like Unicode.

[Karen · Rating 4 out of 5]

I thought this was really well done. Parts were dry, others laugh-out-loud funny, others reflective. He covered a lot of ground, and while I'm not going to remember the names of specific organizations involved in proposing new emoji, I appreciate how well the author was able to move between technical topics, sociopolitical issues, and linguistics.

[Caleb Deck · Rating 3 out of 5]

This was fairly decent, though missing some of the hooks I hoped for. I heard Houston on a podcast discussing some of the topics and more fun anecdotes about emoji (an emoji response to a text is a legally binding document?!) but this was a bit more technical. Still plenty of interesting facts and a great overview of the changing text, but it never quite captured me the way I expected it to.

[Gi V · Rating 4 out of 5]

A fascinating history of emoji. This book was a good pairing with Enough is Enuf (Gabe Henry) and is making me look forward to re-reading Because Internet (Gretchen McCulloch) that I read pre-GR in 2023.

[Linda]

See review here:
https://spectrumculture.com/2025/08/2...

[Keith · Rating 5 out of 5]

A comprehensive history of emoji. But the print book for the best experience of the illustrations.

[River · Rating 3 out of 5]

*Because Internet* has a lot more information than this book

[Daniel Watkins · Rating 4 out of 5]

Really well done. Engaging history of emoji and how they get used. Doesn’t overstay its welcome.

[Michelle Scott Roark · Rating 3 out of 5]

Interesting subject and a light hearted tone.

[Patricia · Rating 4 out of 5]

Very interesting.

[Jennifer · Rating 4 out of 5]

Surprisingly enjoyable, integrates insights from tech, politics, and global cultures

[aditi · Rating 4 out of 5]

definitely scratched the itch i have for an online history! good short read and super well-researched!

[Chris Friend · Rating 4 out of 5]

Exactly as serious as it needs to (not) be. Whimsically studious.

[Olivia · Rating 3 out of 5]

Emoji 🤨🤨🤨