Knowing the history doesn’t solve the mystery—it deepens it. The Coca-Cola script was drawn in the 1880s by a bookkeeper, Frank Mason Robinson, in the elegant Spencerian style of his time. There was no brief, no hidden joke, no secret intention to make it smile. As far as we can tell, it was simply decoration.
And yet, over time, we decided it was a smile.
That’s where this stops being a Coca-Cola story and becomes a human one. Our brains are wired to see faces and feelings everywhere, especially in symbols we live with daily. Coca-Cola built a brand around joy and nostalgia, and we’ve returned the favor—projecting warmth onto a flourish drawn more than a century ago. Intentional or not, the smile is real now, because the most powerful branding doesn’t live in the design file. It lives in us.
