About Yellow Heart
Yellow Heart is the Unicode character 💛 at codepoint U+1F49B in the Miscellaneous Symbols and Pictographs block of the Supplementary Multilingual Plane (SMP).
Reference
A first-wave heart. U+1F49B sits in Miscellaneous Symbols and Pictographs with general category So, has been in the standard since Unicode 6.0, and carries Emoji_Presentation — so one codepoint renders in colour with no variation selector involved. Its chart entry carries no annotation and no cross-reference at all, which puts it among the plainer entries in a block where the hearts are otherwise heavily cross-linked. Unicode's emoji test data places it in the heart subgroup, which holds twenty-five fully qualified emoji in total: twenty-one single codepoints and four sequences.
Typical uses
- Warm messages that are not meant to read as romantic
- Anything keyed to a yellow palette, where the colour is doing the work
- Reactions, where a colour distinction is easier to scan than a word
At a glance
- U+1F49B, Miscellaneous Symbols and Pictographs; Unicode 6.0; general category So
- Emoji version E0.6 — one of five named colours in the first release
- Emoji_Presentation, so no U+FE0F is needed
- East Asian Width Wide; line break class ID; no decomposition
- No HTML named entity. Write 💛 or 💛
Historical Notes
Origins
Yellow's associations — sunshine, cheer, friendship — are cultural rather than encoded, and platforms have layered their own meanings on top. The character data says nothing about any of them.
Unicode
Added in Unicode 6.0, the release that folded the Japanese carrier emoji sets into the standard, and published as emoji version E0.6. Miscellaneous Symbols and Pictographs holds 768 assigned characters, 637 of which carry an emoji property.
The twelve colours, in order
The heart subgroup's named colours arrived across roughly fifteen years, and the order is checkable rather than remembered: red, yellow, green, blue and purple at E0.6; black at E3.0; orange at E5.0; brown and white at E12.0; pink, light blue and grey at E15.0. Five, then seven more. A palette that looks like a designed set was assembled a piece at a time, which is why the later names have to qualify themselves.
Developer Notes
| Unicode Codepoint | |
| Decimal | |
| UTF-8 (hex) | |
| UTF-16 (hex) | |
| HEX Entity | |
| HTML Entity | |
| CSS (\xxxx) | |
| JavaScript | |
| Python |
How to Use Yellow Heart
To use the Yellow 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: '\1F49B';.
In JavaScript and TypeScript the escape '\u{1F49B}' evaluates to 💛. In Python source, write '\U0001F49B'.
The character encodes to F0 9F 92 9B as UTF-8 bytes and D83D DC9B as UTF-16 code units. Its decimal codepoint is 128155.
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.
Things to know
- One codepoint, Emoji_Presentation. No selector required.
- Outside the Basic Multilingual Plane, so it is a surrogate pair in UTF-16 and a naive character count reports two.
- East Asian Width Wide, so a terminal reserves two cells for it.
- Sorting by codepoint puts the coloured hearts in encoding order rather than in any colour order — U+1F49B lands between the green and purple hearts, not near the red one.
- No named HTML entity. Write 💛 or 💛.
- Line break class ID.
In the Wild
An encyclopaedia article on the heart symbol uses no coloured heart at all — not this one and not any of its eleven siblings.
That is the pattern reference writing keeps: the hearts appear in code charts and variation-sequence tables, and only the red heart breaks out of it. Reference writing describes hearts; it does not send them.
Pages change; this is what those showed on the day.
FAQ
Does yellow mean friendship?
On some platforms it has been assigned that meaning by the platform. The character itself carries no meaning beyond its name, and the encoding records nothing about usage.
Do I need a variation selector?
No. Emoji_Presentation means one codepoint renders in colour.
Why is there no plain "gold" or "amber" heart?
The subgroup has twelve named colours and those are the ones encoded. Names are permanent once assigned, which is why later additions had to qualify themselves.
Is there an HTML entity?
No named one. Write 💛 or 💛.