The face with tears of joy emoji, AKA the cry-laugh emoji, holds a healthy lead making it the most popular emoji of 2022. In second place we have the crying emoji, which may suggest an online world of sadness. But, as we previously reported, this emoji is used to express a whole range of emotions.

In terms of year-on-year change, the fire emoji has seen the biggest increase, while the pleading face has the biggest decrease. If this continues, we could see a fair few ranking changes by the end of the year.

Speaking of changing ranks, let’s take a look at how popularity has changed over time.

While the cry-laugh emoji has topped the list the majority of the time, there were two months in 2021 where it lost its crown. It’s recovered though and is reestablishing its dominance as the most popular emoji. Clearly the versatility of the crying emoji is not as effective, with newer emojis muscling in on its territory. But we’ll get to that later.

Further down the pack, the rest of the emojis have been growing in popularity, except for the pleading face. This has steadily declined since 2021, with little sign of a reversal. If this continues, we can expect to see it fall out of the top six entirely, giving way to the likes of smiling face with hearts or smiling face with heart-eyes. At least there will be some more love in the world.

Now it’s time to zoom in on the global picture and see how things change on a country-level. Here’s seven we chose to take a closer look at.

The laugh-cry emoji proves popular in most of the countries we looked at, although it only took 5th place in Japan. Here it’s sparkles that top the list, and Japan is also the only country to have the two hearts and water droplets emojis in its top ten.

There are only three other emojis that appear in just one country’s top list. There’s Australia’s wink, the UK’s clap, and the US’s eyes.

Overall though, there is a sense of conformity. The same set of emojis dominated the top ten wherever we looked, suggesting emojis have cemented themselves as a way to express ourselves with some uniformity across the globe. Of course, there’s always debate on the exact meaning of emojis.

The new kids on the block

Unicode, the organisation behind standardizing emojis (and a ton of other things), regularly releases updates to make changes to existing emojis and to introduce brand new ones (we’re still waiting for a crow emoji).

The latest update came in March of this year, and along with it came over 30 new emojis. We wanted to find out how quickly they have been adopted, and which ones people have taken to the most.

Here’s what we found out.

By a huge margin, the face holding back tears emoji comes out on top. Offering a clear way to express tearful joy, such as at a very cute cat or a heroic deed, clearly this resonates with a lot of people online. We may even see it break into the overall top 20 before long.

This brings us back to the decline of the crying and pleading face emoji. The crying emoji has often been used as a tearful joy reaction, while the pleading face bears a strong resemblance to the face holding back tears one. It makes sense that this new emoji will be cracking the popularity of the older two.

In second place, and a personal favorite of mine, is the melting face emoji. According to Emojipedia, it’s used to express embarrassment and shame, but, more importantly, extreme heat. With extreme heat waves becoming more common, sadly we may see the popularity of this emoji rise. At least it’s a good design.

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The Brandwatch Bulletin team