U+1F638 GRINNING CAT FACE WITH SMILING EYES

U+1F638 was added to Unicode in version 6.0 (2010). It belongs to the block Emoticons in the Supplementary Multilingual Plane.

This character is a Other Symbol and is commonly used, that is, in no specific script.

The glyph is not a composition. It has a Neutral East Asian Width. In bidirectional context it acts as Other Neutral and is not mirrored. In text U+1F638 behaves as Ideographic regarding line breaks. It has type Other for sentence and Other for word breaks. The Grapheme Cluster Break is Any.

On Youtube this character is sometimes wrongly displayed as U0001f638.

The Wikipedia has the following information about this codepoint:

An emotion icon, better known by the portmanteau emoticon (/ɨˈmoʊtɨkɒn/) is a metacommunicative pictorial representation of a facial expression that, in the absence of body language and prosody, serves to draw a receiver's attention to the tenor or temper of a sender's nominal non-verbal communication, changing and improving its interpretation. It expresses — usually by means of punctuation marks (though it can include numbers and letters) — a person's feelings or mood, though as emoticons have become more popular, some devices have provided stylized pictures that do not use punctuation.

In Western countries, emoticons are usually written at a right angle to the direction of the text. Users from Japan popularized a kind of emoticons called kaomojis (顔文字, often confused with emojis in the West) that can be understood without tilting one's head to the left. This style arose on ASCII NET of Japan in 1986.

As social media has become widespread, emoticons have played a significant role in communication through technology. They offer another range of "tone" and feeling through texting that portrays specific emotions through facial gestures while in the midst of text-based cyber communication.