The most-tweeted food emoji in the world has been revealed: it’s a birthday cake.

The earth-shattering, life-changing news was announced by Twitter as part of World Emoji Day celebrations. According to Twitter, people around the world are expressing themselves with emoji more than ever before. If the data is anything to go by, it would seem that they do so a lot on people’s birthdays.

The second most tweeted food emoji was a slice of pizza, with a strawberry, two beers and a cup of coffee rounding out the top five.

Kim Kardashian recently made headlines for Snapchatting a series of food emoji while on the “crazy strict” Atkins diet. A slice of pizza was among them.

Originating on Japanese mobile phones in the 1990s, emoji have become increasingly popular worldwide since their inclusion in the Apple iPhone. The word itself comes from Japanese and translates literally as “pictograph”. The resemblance to the English words“emotion” and “emoticon” is purely coincidental.

Collected over the course of the last financial year, Twitter’s data showed that the most-tweeted emoji in the world was a smiley face crying with laughter. A smiley with love hearts for eyes came second, while a smiley drowning in a pool of its own tears came third. Australia bucked this trend a little, with our third most-tweeted emoji a love heart, pushing the crying one back to fourth. (We’re a happy people.)

Australia’s most-tweeted “unique” emoji – one that doesn’t appear in the global top ten – was a thumbs up emoji. If that doesn’t say something about Australians, we here at delicious. don’t know what does.

Other countries’ most-tweeted unique emojis were equally revealing. In Italy, it was a sparkling love heart. In Japan, it was (ahem) a vibrating one. Argentinians, Brazilians and Colombians all tweeted a lot of musical note emojis. In Mexico and India – both deeply religious countries – users preferred an image of two hands together in prayer. We can’t help but feel sorry for Americans and Canadians: their most-tweeted image was of a face crying out in woe.

Perhaps the most important revelation, however – the sort of thing that changes one’s perspective on the world – was what users’ most-tweeted animal emoji was. We know what you’re thinking. It’s the Internet, right? It has to be a cat.

Actually, it’s the “see no evil” monkey. Do with that what you will.