Adding My Own Custom Smiley

Hi. I am trying to add a smiley on a page. I am using this character ☺ (smile) which should show a simple smiley face under normal circumstances. However, I get an image smiley instead which is yellow plus has heart cheeks and on screen it looks more like a sad face than a happy face! I am also not fond of the yellow characters (at least for where I want my one miley placed). I want it to output the same as ascii characters normally do.

I believe the smiley that is generated comes from an image in the /wpincludes/images/smileys/ folder.

Below is an image of what I see and also what I want instead.
https://www.improve21.com.au/smileys.jpg

I thought maybe that maybe I could simply edit that particular smiley image and looked in the /wpincludes/images/smileys/ folder for it, but the outputted image isn’t even in that folder! I don’t know where it’s coming from, and as I can’t find it, I can’t edit/replace it.

I then thought maybe mt theme may have its own smiles which over-ride the wordpress ones, but my theme offers no smileys.

I then read this page: https://codex.www.ads-software.com/Using_Smilies
and saw that i can create a new folder and redirect to that folder with my own icons. But I want to leave the current smileys as they are and simply create one new icon and name it so I can call it up. So that solution won’t help me either.

Then I thought maybe I could find a plugin that allows me to add my own custom images and give them a name. But there are hardly any smiley plugins out there and of the few out there, most are outdated and the only one left is wp-Monalisa but it won’t allow me to add my own.

So, now I am stumped. Would anyone know of a way for me to make it display how I want?