Black heart 🖤

How to read it

🖤 is U+1F5A4 BLACK HEART, approved in Unicode 9.0 in 2016; Unicode’s emoji data places it in Emoji 3.0. It was a requested emoji: Unicode’s 2015 list of additions (L2/15-054r4) cites Emojipedia’s most-requested list for 2014, and notes that the existing “black heart” character already showed up red, because ❤️ is officially named HEAVY BLACK HEART. Unicode’s chart says the new one is “unequivocally represented as black in all variants”. Its keywords in Unicode’s emoji list are black, evil, heart and wicked, the only coloured heart with no “love” or 143 among them. People don’t follow the keywords so closely. Emojipedia says it may express morbidity, sorrow or dark humour, but “despite the color remains most commonly used for love and affection”, and Dictionary.com adds appreciation for black things, such as coffee or an outfit.

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Two readings: dark humour and solidarity

Dictionary.com’s 2018 entry gives both. For some, it says, the black heart suits feeling angsty and misunderstood, emo, a “dark twisted soul” or a morbid sense of humour, and it quotes Kimberley Richards of Romper: the emoji is “for the cold, dark, and twisted sense of humor that lives in many emoji-using people.” Then, “much more seriously”, it notes the black heart’s growing use to support the Black Lives Matter movement. Emojipedia measured that use in June 2020, after the death of George Floyd. In a sample of 278,244 tweets mentioning Black Lives Matter, 🖤 was the third most-used emoji, after ✊ raised fist and 😭 loudly crying face; Emojipedia’s Keith Broni called it a symbol of solidarity and support for and among Black communities. Its use peaked on 2 June 2020. Broni also cautioned that many tweets with a black heart have nothing to do with the movement, though “Black Lives Matter” was the commonest phrase beside it on 4 and 5 June. Dictionary.com records it used with the brown heart and a dark-skinned ✊🏾 raised fist.

Why ❤️ is officially “black”

Emojipedia explains that the red heart’s Unicode name is older than colour emoji, from a time when “black” meant a solid heart. That is why ❤️ is HEAVY BLACK HEART and the playing-card heart ♥ is BLACK HEART SUIT, both cross-referenced with 🖤 in Unicode’s charts, and why Unicode had to add a new character when people wanted a heart that is black on screen.