Nokia :: 5530 Send Smiley Faces Or Winks / Signs Do Not Show Up / To Whomever It Send

I have a Nokia 5530 XpressMusic that is 3 months old And I've had no problems with it until recently.It has come to my attention that When I send smiley faces or winks such as ^___^ or ^___~, the ^ and ~ signs do not show up to whomever i send the text message to and only the underscore ___ is seen by the reciever. In my inbox it shows those symbols but in the reciever's inbox it's just an underscore. I'm not sure if that happens to other characters since i mainly use those two.I update the software/firmware (I'm not familiar with the terminology) frequently. So I'm not sure if this problem is just the phone that I recieved or if not all phones could recieve the ^ /~ sign (i doubt it though).