How many hearts are in this emoji? The answer depends on when and where you looked. Two, on most platforms today, chasing each other around a shared centre with little motion lines to sell the spin. But Google once drew five in a ring with no motion at all, Samsung drew three, and Microsoft drew four. Nothing in the Unicode name settles the matter — "revolving hearts" commits to the movement, not the arithmetic.
Its lineage is narrower than most of the emoji keyboard. Unicode's own mapping file records this one arriving from a single Japanese carrier, KDDI, where it lived on au handsets from around 2002. DoCoMo and SoftBank had no equivalent to reconcile when the rival sets were merged into the standard. A great deal of what you type every day is a three-way compromise between those carriers; this one never had to negotiate.
It gets mixed up constantly with two hearts, the small pink pair that people actually reach for, and the gap between them is wider than you would guess. In a 2020 look at how hearts were used on Twitter, two hearts placed near the very top and this one sat down in fourteenth. If you want the everyday affectionate sparkle, you probably mean the other one. This is the one that is spinning.
About Revolving Hearts
Revolving Hearts is the Unicode character 💞 at codepoint U+1F49E 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 Revolving Hearts
To use the Revolving Hearts 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: '\1F49E';.
In JavaScript and TypeScript the escape '\u{1F49E}' evaluates to 💞. In Python source, write '\U0001F49E'.
The character encodes to F0 9F 92 9E as UTF-8 bytes and D83D DC9E as UTF-16 code units. Its decimal codepoint is 128158.
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.