~@~, or :hankey:, or the poop emoji as it’s known, has quite the history. What was originally a swirly brown pile of poo surrounded by buzzing flies , is now the friendly smiling face we all know today.

The poop emoji is one of the most poopular iPhone emojis, scoring highest in usage by a SwiftKey report (SwiftKey is a keyboard app for iPhone and Android). This report showed that between October 2014 to January 2015 America, United Kingdom, Canada and Australia all used the poop emoji more than any other emoji. However, it wasn’t always so welcomed amongst emoji-fans.

First introduced as a part of the Unicode 6.0 in 2010, the emoji was a literal poop pile with flies buzzing around the top of the pile, and people were not impressed. Gmail held the strongest path of resistance against the emoji, stating that they felt people would be offended by the vulgarity of the emoji. It took the persuasion of the creators of the emoji, Darick Tong, Darren Lewis, Takeshi Kishimoto, and Katsuhiko “Kat” Momoi, to get the poo-moji on to Gmail.

From its start at Gmail to where the little stinker is now, the emoji has had to fight for its stance. The emoji was created to be much more innocent, originally it was supposed to be known as a chocolate soft serve swirl. It was then interpreted in Dazed Magazine, Buzzfeed, and Huffington Post who came up with a list of ways the emoji could be used, citing poop as one use.

With the little brown pile now outed as the international symbol for poop, in emoji form, people have come up with several ways to create funny uses. For example  +  is “shit-storm.”  + is "tough shit."  +  is "bullshit." And, my personal favorite,   +  +  is "no shit Sherlock."

 Images courtesy of SwiftKey