What emoji was the most popular of 2021?

The Unicode Consortium just released their list of the most popular emoji of 2021, and the results are pretty much unchanged from the previous iteration in 2019. Considering everything that we’ve been through in the last two years, it’s actually quite comforting to see that our favorite emojis continue to mostly be the positive ones.

The most popular of all, the laughing crying face officially known as Tears of Joy 😂, also happens to be a controversial one, with Gen Z officially labeling it as an uncool emoji that only older generations use. It still makes up 5 percent of all emoji use, with only the Red Heart ❤️ coming close to that amount in second place. After that the margin gets pretty wide.

Unicode also found that our overall emoji use doesn’t vary much. There are 3,663 emoji, but the 100 most popular account for about 82 percent of all uses. Unsurprisingly, the hand and face emoji category is the most popular, with the plants and emotions categories following close behind. And the national flags category is the least popular, despite being the largest.

You can check out the full results here.