Happy Smiley

Many of us had used many of them in our text messages irrespect to E-mail,Mobile not to forget in our chat applications add an more expressive text message being sent to our loved Ones.Well I guess You might not have a clue where it had Its Origin.

A smiley or happy face (☺/☻), is a stylized representation of a smiling human face, commonly represented as a yellow (many other colors are also used) circle (or sphere) with two black dots representing eyes and a black half circle representing the mouth. “Smiley” is also sometimes used as a generic term for any emoticon.

The variant spelling "smilie" is not as common, but the plural form "smilies" (the plural of "smily", not "smiley") is commonly used.

The iconic smiley with the black ink smile and two oval dots for eyes inside of a black circle printed on a yellow background was created by freelance artist Harvey Ball in 1963 in an advertising campaign by The State Mutual Life Assurance Company of Worcester, Massachusetts, USA.
Harvey Ball designed the first Smiley face, while working at State Mutual Life Assurance Company as a freelance artist.However, the first smiley face recorded on film can be seen being drawn in Ingmar Bergman's film "Hamnstad", released in 1948. The film is a drama about a depressed and suicidal young woman named Berit and in one scene she draws an unhappy face on the bathroom mirror using her lipstick.A man at the Rally to Restore Sanity and/or Fear carrying a smiley with a Hitler mustache satirically drawn on it

The graphic was popularized in the early 1970s by Philadelphia brothers Bernard and Murray Spain, who seized upon it in September 1970 in a campaign to sell novelty items. The two produced buttons as well as coffee mugs, t-shirts, bumper stickers and many other items emblazoned with the symbol and the phrase "Have a happy day" which mutated into "have a nice day". Working with New York button manufacturer NG Slater, some 50 million smiley badges were produced by 1972.

In the 1970s, the Smiley face (and the accompanying 'have a nice day' mantra) is also said to have become a zombifying hollow sentiment, emblematic of Richard Nixon-era America and the passing from the optimism of the Summer of Love into the more cynical decade that followed. This motif is evidenced in the era of paranoid soul such as "Smiling Faces Sometimes" (released by The Temptations in April 1971, and by The Undisputed Truth in July 1971), "I'll Take You There" (The Staples Singers, 1972), "Don't Call Me Brother" (The O'Jays, 1973), "Back Stabbers" (The O'Jays), and "You Caught Me Smilin'" (Sly and the Family Stone, 1971).The origins of this was parodied in a famous scene from the movie Forrest Gump when Forrest is on his multiple jogs across America, and wipes his face on a T shirt given him by a struggling salesman, and on the shirt, as if transferred there by Forrest's face, reminiscent of the Shroud of Turin, is the image of the smiley face, whereupon the man gets his idea. The smiley face was also seen on a van in a scene from Mork and Mindy, the van driven by men who kidnap them.

In the UK, the smiley is associated with psychedelic culture since Ubi Dwyer and the Windsor Free Festival in the 1970s and the acid house dance music culture that emerged during the second summer of love in the late 1980s. The face was used as an engraved logo on ecstasy tablets at the time. The association was cemented when the band Bomb The Bass used an extracted smiley from Watchmen on the centre of its Beat Dis hit single.