Grey heart 🩶

How to read it

🩶 is U+1FA76 GREY HEART, released in Unicode 15.0 and Emoji 15.0 in 2022, with the pink heart and light blue heart, and TechCrunch reported in February 2023 that it was coming to iPhones with iOS 16.4. Unicode named it with the British spelling, grey, though Jennifer Daniel’s proposal (L2/21-201) was titled “Gray Heart”; both spellings are among its keywords, with silver and slate. Emojipedia records little beyond the general rule for coloured hearts, that they are used for people, places, groups and things of the same colour.

Also searched as: 🩶, gray heart emoji, grey heart emoji, grey heart emoji meaning, what does the grey heart emoji mean.

What its proposer expected

Daniel’s proposal listed the uses she expected: flags with grey in them, such as those of Brussels and Las Vegas; sports teams, since fans of the San Antonio Spurs had no silver heart; the asexual flag, which has a grey stripe; silver things, as in “Silver Fox”; and the #grombre community on Instagram, people embracing early grey hair. Unicode’s 2021 paper on heart colours added that grey was one of only two basic colour terms the hearts lacked, the other being pink.

Look-alikes

🤍 white heart is the paler one, and the two are easy to confuse because the white heart is not quite white: Dictionary.com notes that most platforms draw it whitish grey, with an outline. 🖤 black heart is solid black.