U+263A WHITE SMILING FACE

U+263A was added to Unicode in version 1.1 (1993). It belongs to the block Miscellaneous Symbols in the Basic Multilingual Plane.

This character is a Other Symbol and is commonly used, that is, in no specific script. The character is also known as have a nice day!.

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+263A behaves as Ideographic regarding line breaks. It has type Other for sentence and Other for word breaks. The Grapheme Cluster Break is Any.

The Wikipedia has the following information about this codepoint:

A smiley (sometimes simply called a happy or smiling face) is a stylized representation of a smiling humanoid face, an important part of popular culture. The classic form designed in 1963 comprises a yellow circle with two black dots representing eyes and a black arc representing the mouth (☺). On the Internet and in other plain text communication channels, the emoticon form (sometimes also called the smiley-face emoticon) has traditionally been most popular, typically employing a colon and a right parenthesis to form sequences like :-), :), or (: that resemble a smiling face when viewed sideways. "Smiley" is also sometimes used as a generic term for any emoticon. The smiley has been referenced in nearly all areas of Western culture including music, movies, and art.

The variant spelling "smilie" is not as common, but the plural form "smilies" is commonly used.

In 1992 a smiley face museum was started by American University alumni Mark Sachs in Silver Spring, Maryland.