World Smile Day - First Friday of October


“ Because of your smile, you make life more beautiful.”, Zen Master Thich Nhat Hanh said. 

World Smile Day is the perfect day to smile and let the world smile with you. It is a day dedicated to "good cheer and good works". 

Let's see how the World Smile Day originated.

History of World Smile Day

You all are familiar with smileys, right? The popular smiley faces are first created by a commercial artist from Worcester, Massachusetts named Harvey Ball in 1963. He never applied for a trademark or copyright for the iconic smiley image. He founded World Smile Foundation in 1999, a non-profit charitable trust that supports children’s causes. 

 place on the first Friday of October each year and is a day dedicated to "good cheer and good works".

Harvey declared the first Friday of October each year as the World Smile Day. The first World Smile Day was held in 1999. 
After Harvey died in 2001, the Harvey Ball World Smile Foundation was created to honor his name and memory.  The Foundation continues as the official sponsor of World Smile Day® each year. The Harvey Ball World Smile Foundation has the motto “Enhancing this world, one smile.”

Trivia

  • Yellow is used as the color of the smiley face because it's a symbol of cheerfulness.
  • When you smile, neurotransmitters called endorphins are created that cause feelings of pleasure.
  • Harvey created smileys as a morale-boosting icon for the employees of an insurance company.
  • He was paid only $45 for his design.
  • Smiley is a stylized representation of a smiling humanoid face
  • A pictorial representation of a facial expression using punctuation marks, numbers and letters, usually written to express a person's feelings or mood is called emoticons.
  • Emoji  (from the Japanese e, “picture,” and moji, “character”) are recent invention.  They are pictographs of faces, objects, and symbols. 
  • Emoji were invented in 1999 by Shigetaka Kurita
Further Reading

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