This one did not enter the standard as a heart. It arrived in 2019 through an internal Unicode proposal titled "Emoji Colors", whose purpose was to supply colour swatches — a set of circles, squares and two hearts meant for sequences that would tint a neighbouring emoji. Fourteen characters shipped from that document: seven squares, five circles, a brown heart, and this one.
The drafting history is the good part. An early version of the proposal recommended the circles alone and explicitly turned the hearts down, on the grounds that if such a sequence failed to combine, a stray heart sitting beside another emoji could be misread as declaring love for it. A later revision put the hearts back anyway. So the objection was raised, written down, and overruled — and the character you can type today is the one the first draft argued against.
Users ignored the swatch idea completely and read it as a heart, which is, after all, what it looks like. It has settled at the sombre end of the family: condolences, memorials, tributes, the death of someone's grandmother. It also does weddings, where the colour is doing literal work. Worth distinguishing from the hollow heart suit, a much older text character that was never intended to render as emoji at all.
About White Heart
White Heart is the Unicode character 🤍 at codepoint U+1F90D in the Supplemental 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 White Heart
To use the White 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: '\1F90D';.
In JavaScript and TypeScript the escape '\u{1F90D}' evaluates to 🤍. In Python source, write '\U0001F90D'.
The character encodes to F0 9F A4 8D as UTF-8 bytes and D83E DD0D as UTF-16 code units. Its decimal codepoint is 129293.
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.