Blue heart 💙

How to read it

💙 is U+1F499 BLUE HEART, approved in Unicode 6.0 in 2010 and added to Emoji 1.0 in 2015, according to Emojipedia. Emojipedia says it is commonly used by brands as a neutral heart colour. Its editor, Keith Broni, told Reader’s Digest that it shows you love something “but not in a way that would be weird for a product”. Dictionary.com’s entry says it is used much like the red heart, for love, support, admiration, happiness and excitement, and especially for things that have some relation to blue: its examples are Duke University sports, marine wildlife, the Smurfs and autism awareness. Unicode’s keywords for it are blue, emotion, heart, ily, love and romance. In November 2022, Broni wrote, departing Twitter staff signed off with the saluting face beside a blue heart.

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The NHS blue heart

In January 2021, as Covid cases filled London hospitals, the group NHS Million asked Twitter users to add a blue heart to their display names, with the hashtag #NHSBlueHeart, to support NHS staff who were being abused online. NHS Million says thousands did, including Gary Lineker, Nigella Lawson and Sara Cox. The Denbighshire Free Press reported that the hashtag reached number one on Twitter in the UK.

Blue for autism, and the objection to it

Dictionary.com lists autism awareness among the blue heart’s uses. The colour comes from “Light It Up Blue”, an awareness campaign of the charity Autism Speaks, and many autistic people reject it. The Autistic Self Advocacy Network, an organisation run by and for autistic people, condemned the White House’s decision to take part in the campaign in 2017 and said Autism Speaks has no significant autistic leadership. The autism organisation AutismBC says many autistic people and advocates have taken up red and gold instead, red through the #RedInstead campaign against blue awareness campaigns, because many feel blue frames autism as something to be “fixed” rather than accepted.

Look-alikes

🩵 light blue heart, added in 2022, is paler, nearer cyan, and Unicode’s chart cross-refers the two. Its proposal argued that a second blue was needed because languages such as Russian and Korean have separate basic words for dark and light blue. The two can be hard to tell apart on some phones: Dictionary.com notes that X’s 💙 is a lighter shade than Apple’s. 💜 is the purple heart, which Unicode’s 2021 heart paper says most vendors drew too close to blue.