community of dyers

It's hard to tell on that page, since the image provided is too small to really see the details, even if you click to try to see a larger image. I think they probably tied the features and then dribbled a fine line of thickened black dye on directly, to the tied fabric. That would be legitimate. You can see that the orange of the face itself is crinkled appropriately around the features.

I'm not sure it's fair to call it "cheating" if someone enhances a design with hand-painting, though, at least if they don't claim that the face itself is tie-dyed. I've done that myself for a shirt for my son, marking the facial features afterwards with a fabric marker when the tie-dye didn't work out quite right. I know it's not what you're interested in doing, though.

Here's one, from The Tie Dyed Shop, in which the eyes and mouth are obviously painted or printed on an otherwise tie-dyed shirt:

I wonder if they started with shirts that were mass-printed with that very commercial-looking face, or if they used screenprinting. Fortunately, there are other people making real tie-dyed smiles....

Here's one, from Made By Hippies, in which the face's features must have been either tie-dyed or batiked:

I love the snapshot and use of non-professional models!

This one, from Twirlytoes's Etsy shop, has features that look imperfect enough to have been tie-dyed:

To me, the lack of corporate-style perfection is preferable to the pre-printed faces. Not every child will agree with me. The multi-colored background is nice.

Brad Garrett's Smiley Face, at Phat Dyes, is obviously 100% tie-dyed:

Nice job. To my eye, this is the best of the bunch, it's so nicely tied. I also like the fact that the mouth is obviously closed. Sometimes an open-mouthed tie-dyed smily face can be a little scary, a little bit too monster-like!

(In every case, the pictures I've quoted in this post can be clicked on, to open the original page where the pictures appear. I believe that all of these shirts are for sale.)

-Paula