This article explains how to add graphical emoticons, or emojis, to Gmail messages on both the desktop and mobile platforms.

Add Visual Gmail Emoticons to Your Messages
Including an emoji in a Gmail message:

start a fresh message's composition. Put the text cursor in the desired location to put the Gmail emoticon.

Press the Insert emoji button in the formatting toolbar (it has a smiling face).

Gmail emoticon of a smiley
To insert it, select the appropriate emoji.

It's possible that the search tab will be the default, therefore you'll need to choose the tab next to it to see the list of all emojis.

Feelings in Gmail
To view various Gmail emoji categories, use the tabs up top.

Emoji groups in Gmail
Gmail keeps track of your favorite emoticons and puts them in a separate tab for easy access. Graphical smileys can also be highlighted, moved, and copied in the same way that text can.

In the plain text version of your message, graphical emoticons aren't represented by comparable text smileys (like:-)). Emojis included by Gmail using Unicode encoding might not appear in email clients that only display ASCII text.

Emoticons that look like graphics can be added to emails sent from mobile devices
Use the emoji keyboards available on iOS and Android to add emojis to messages using the Gmail apps for iOS and Android as well as the mobile web versions of Gmail.

Open the Gmail app on your smartphone, then start a new message.

The emoji keyboard will appear when you tap the emoji button.

You can add emoticons to your message by tapping on them. As always, send.
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