We're watching the return of the tears of joy emoji

The laughing crying emoji might be coming back into vogue.

According to an Emojipedia analysis of over 2.16 billion tweets, the face with tears of joy emoji 😂 has returned to its spot as Twitter's number one emoji by the slimmest of margins, just barely surpassing the loudly crying face 😭. 

This doesn't necessarily mean that the face with tears of joy emoji is cool again, though. The change is largely due to the loudly crying face experiencing a steep drop in popularity in January, from 1.93 billion uses in December to 1.78 billion uses in the month. Thats a total decrease of about 150 million uses. The face with tears of joy emoji only increased 20 million uses from December to January.

The emoji been going through different phases online over the past few years, being labeled as "cringe" and a communication tool used predominately by Millennials. It was released with the first-ever set of emoji back in 2011, and was the most popular emoji from 2019 to 2021. It's no wonder that it had an absolute chokehold on Millennials.

Then Gen Z came along, and created their own way to communicate online, with ever-changing combinations of the loudly crying face 😭, the skull 💀, the pleading eyes 🥺, and even the chair emoji🪑.

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But not all users follow the cultural guidelines set up by the youngest generation, so the face with tears of joy has continued to top the charts despite its cringe factor. And, now, some young people use the face ironically, too, which could help that uptick.

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Following the crying face emoji, the top emoji used on Twitter were: sparkles ✨, rolling on the floor laughing 🤣, pleading face 🥺, red heart ❤️, folded hands 🙏, smiling face with heart eyes 😍, smiling face with hearts 🥰, and smiling face with smiling eyes 😊.

It shouldn't come as a surprise that emoji evolve just as any other tool in our lexicon. Congrats to the tears of joy emoji, which has held onto its spot as one of the most used emoji for so many years. 😂 🏆 🥳

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