About

Smeel is an exploitable image series featuring illustrated depictions of characters from the Hasbro franchise My Little Pony: Friendship is Magic (MLP: FiM) wearing a large grin on their face. Variations are frequently used as reaction images in a similar vein to Twiface.

Origin

On January 15th, 2012, an illustration of the character Rainbow Dash by MLP: FiM storyboard artist Sabrina Alberghetti^[1] was uploaded to the MLP fanart site Deeriboo.ru^[2] (shown below, left). On February 11th, DeviantArtist PikachuX1000^[3] uploaded a colored and vectored image of Rainbow Dash based on a cropped portion of Alberghetti's illustration (shown below, right).

Spread

That same day, PikachuX1000 uploaded several other edited versions featuring other MLP: FiM characters. The next day, a version featuring Princess Celestia was also created.^[5] On November 6th, PikachuX1000 replied to a comment on the Rainbow Dash illustration, explaining that the word "smeel" is an alternate pronunciation of the word "smile".^[3] On May 19th, 2012, a DeviantArt^[8] group dedicated to the smeel exploitable was created, which gained over 90 members in the next three years.

Various Examples

As of July 2015, the keyword "smeel" yields more than 920 results on DeviantArt^[6] and upwards of 50 results on Derpibooru.^[7]

Search Interest

External References