When the State Mutual Life Assurance Company hired graphic artist Harvey Ross Ball in 1963 to design an image that would lift employee morale after a corporate merger, he had no idea of the cultural colossus his bright yellow smiley face design would become.

Ball drew his simple but infectious smiley face—two slightly mismatched dots and a flick made with a black felt marker—in Worcester, Massachusetts, where he was born, raised, worked and died. He received just $45 for the job. 

“Harvey Ball is acknowledged as the guy who explicitly set the stylized smiling face within modern marketing practices,” says Gabriele Marino, a research fellow at the University of Turin in Italy, who studies internet memes and virality.

State Mutual was so impressed by Ball’s work that the company put the face onto thousands of pins, which sold out quickly. But since neither State Mutual nor Ball copyrighted the design, other companies simply made their own versions of the smiley face. 

Of course, Ball wasn’t the first creative to ever draw a smiley face. “[Humans] are simply obsessed by the face,” says Marino. “Stylized faces are on the earliest hand-drawn paintings found in prehistoric caves such as those of Angoulême and Lene Hara, which are between 10,000 and 27,000 years old.”

Marino believes that humans have always sought to assign a face to objects because we equate it with “humanity and individuality,” adding, “whatever interests us has a face, and we assign a face to whatever interests us.”

Bernard and Murray Spain, who owned two Hallmark stores in Philadelphia, were the first to see the potential for mass-producing Ball’s Smiley Face design. Because of the trademark oversight, the Spain brothers simply added the slogan, “Have a happy day” below their smiley face. Within a year of copyrighting their sloganed version of the smiley face in 1971, they’d sold 50 million items. 

In France in 1972, journalist Franklin Loufrani trademarked his own version. Calling his face “Smiley,” he launched the Smiley Company, sold T-shirts with the face on them and inked licensing deals with businesses in more than 100 countries. “Loufrani saw the power of the marketed smiley face and aptly exploited it all the way,” says Marino. The Smiley Company, run today by Loufrani’s son, is believed to make around $500 million a year. 

Unlike so many passing fads, the smiley face has had remarkable pop culture staying power—and adaptability. Tom Hanks’ title character in the 1994 film Forrest Gump invoked the design when he wipes his muddy face on a yellow tee, hands it off to someone, and says, “Have a nice day!” Contemporary product designers have plastered the feel-good face on everything from golf balls to dog ponchos to boxer shorts. An argument can be made that the smiley face was the original precursor to emojis.

It has also been co-opted to express counter-culture irony. Rave culture of the 1980s and ’90s adopted it in the spirit of dance-party hedonism, printing it on everything from bandanas to whistles to ecstasy pills. Nirvana frontman Kurt Cobain drew it with Xs for eyes and a tongue hanging from the side of a wavy-lined mouth. (Meanwhile, a slogan on the back read: "FLOWER SNIFFIN KITTY PETTIN BABY KISSIN CORPORATE ROCK WHORES.") And the authors of the Watchmen comic book series of 1986-87, an antihero superhero saga, gave the smiley face a blood-spattered makeover. As Watchmen artist Dave Gibbons told Entertainment Weekly in 2017, “It’s something familiar that now has a different meaning.”