Brown heart 🤎
A brown heart. Besides affection, it is used for racial identity and in support of Black and brown people, often beside a black heart 🖤 and a dark-skinned raised fist ✊🏾.
How to read it
🤎 is U+1F90E BROWN HEART, released with the white heart in Unicode 12.0 and Emoji 12.0 in 2019. Unicode’s emoji tables trace it to a 2018 proposal on emoji colours (L2/18-141), which also gave emoji its 🟤 brown circle. Dictionary.com’s entry says it is used for love, affection and close bonds, and specifically to support racial equality and justice for people of colour, especially with the Black Lives Matter movement. Emojipedia says it is often used to discuss racial identity. Unicode’s keywords for it are only brown and heart, besides the number 143. Dictionary.com notes that Microsoft’s design has a black outline.
Also searched as: 🤎, brown heart emoji, brown heart emoji meaning, what does the brown heart emoji mean.
How people use an emoji changes quickly. These pages give each emoji’s Unicode name and the uses recorded by the sources cited, as of September 2026, and are reviewed yearly.
The 2020 protests
Dictionary.com says supporters of Black Lives Matter put the brown heart in usernames and posts to show solidarity with Black people and other people of colour, and commonly combine it with the black heart and the raised fist in its darker skin tones; its examples include Juneteenth and Black History Month posts from 2020. Keith Broni of Emojipedia told Reader’s Digest that it “became popular online during the Black Lives Matter movement”, and that it is used to express identity as a person of colour or support for Black and brown people.
The least-used heart
Emojipedia reports that in February 2021 the brown heart was the least used of the nine coloured hearts that then existed.
Read next
- Next in Emoji meaningsPink heart đź©·A plain pink heart, added in 2022 after years as one of the most requested emoji. People use it for love, friendship and warmth, and for anything cute or pink.
- The same shape in Phone status iconsiPhone status bar iconsThe icons at the top of an iPhone’s screen show its connection, battery, privacy indicators and which features are on. Apple’s iPhone User Guide names each one.
More emoji meanings
The same shape elsewhere
Browse symbols drawn with curves and waves.
Sources
- Supplemental Symbols and Pictographs, Range: 1F900–1F9FF (code chart), The Unicode Standard, Unicode Consortium, U+1F90E
- Emoji List, v18.0, Unicode emoji charts (CLDR short names and English keywords), read September 2026, Unicode Consortium, U+1F90E
- Emoji Recently Added, v12.0, Unicode emoji charts, Unicode Consortium, Smileys & Emotion
- Emoji Proposals, v18.0, Unicode emoji charts, read September 2026, Unicode Consortium, 2019; 2018 proposals
- Brown Heart Emoji Meaning, Emojipedia emoji page, read October 2026, Emojipedia, Meaning
- 🤎 Brown Heart emoji, Dictionary.com Emoji Dictionary, 4 November 2020, Dictionary.com, What does / Where does
- A Guide to Heart Emoji Meanings, According to an Emoji Expert, Charlotte Hilton Andersen, Reader’s Digest, updated 28 January 2025 (interview with Keith Broni, Emojipedia), Reader’s Digest, 🤎 Brown heart meaning
- Document Register 2018, Unicode Technical Committee document register, Unicode Consortium, L2/18-141
Last reviewed October 8, 2026 by Rory Hansen. How we research
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