A relative newcomer, the black heart only entered Unicode in 2016 — decades after the red one — arriving to fill a gap the coloured hearts had left open: a heart for the darker, cooler end of the emotional range. It is a genuine emoji in its own right, not the old monochrome text-heart that appears when a red heart loses its colour, though the two are easy to mix up at a glance.
Its uses cluster around a few moods. It's the heart of dark humour and deadpan — sent alongside a grim joke to signal "I know this is bleak, and I find it funny anyway." It suits goth, emo, and minimalist aesthetics, where a red heart would clash. And it does real work in grief: for some people black feels more honest than red when marking a death or a hard anniversary.
The through-line is tone rather than the absence of feeling. A black heart is not "no love"; it's love or approval delivered dry, styled, or in mourning. Read it the way you'd read someone's all-black outfit — a deliberate choice about mood, not a lack of one.
About Black Heart
Black Heart is the Unicode character 🖤 at codepoint U+1F5A4 in the Miscellaneous Symbols and Pictographs block of the Supplementary Multilingual Plane (SMP).
Technical Reference
| Unicode Codepoint | |
| Decimal | |
| UTF-8 (hex) | |
| UTF-16 (hex) | |
| HEX Entity | |
| HTML Entity | |
| CSS (\xxxx) | |
| JavaScript | |
| Python |
How to Use Black Heart
To use the Black Heart symbol (🖤) in HTML, insert the
entity 🖤 directly into your markup. The decimal entity 🖤 works in any HTML-serialised document.
In CSS pseudo-elements use content: '\1F5A4';.
In JavaScript and TypeScript the escape '\u{1F5A4}' evaluates to 🖤. In Python source, write '\U0001F5A4'.
The character encodes to F0 9F 96 A4 as UTF-8 bytes and D83D DDA4 as UTF-16 code units. Its decimal codepoint is 128420.
This is a fully-qualified emoji and should render with colour on iOS, Android, Windows and macOS. Appearance may vary between platforms, but the underlying codepoint is identical everywhere.