Technically, this is two emoji wearing one costume. Heart on Fire is a ZWJ sequence — a red heart and a flame joined by an invisible "zero-width joiner" character that tells your device to fuse them into a single burning-heart glyph. On software that doesn't recognise the combination, it falls apart into exactly that: a red heart followed by a flame, side by side. That's the giveaway that you're looking at a composite rather than a single carved symbol.
The imagery is old even if the emoji is not. A heart wreathed in flames echoes the Sacred Heart of Christian art and centuries of love poetry that describe passion as burning, and the emoji leans into that romantic reading: intense desire, a love that is anything but lukewarm.
It reached phones fairly recently, in the 2020–2021 wave of additions, which is worth knowing for a practical reason — on older devices it may not render as intended. If you send it and the recipient sees a heart and a flame as two separate pictures, nothing is broken; their system simply predates the recipe that stitches the two together.
About Heart On Fire
Heart On Fire is the Unicode character ❤️🔥 at codepoint U+2764 in the Dingbats block of the Basic Multilingual Plane (BMP).
Technical Reference
| Unicode Codepoint | |
| Decimal | |
| UTF-8 (hex) | |
| UTF-16 (hex) | |
| HEX Entity | |
| CSS (\xxxx) | |
| JavaScript | |
| Python |
How to Use Heart On Fire
To use the Heart On Fire symbol (❤️🔥) in HTML, insert the
entity ❤️‍🔥 directly into your markup.
In CSS pseudo-elements use content: '\2764';.
In JavaScript and TypeScript the escape '\u2764' evaluates to ❤️🔥. In Python source, write '\u2764'.
The character encodes to E2 9D A4 as UTF-8 bytes and 2764 as UTF-16 code units. Its decimal codepoint is 10084.
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.