Light blue heart 🩵

How to read it

🩵 is U+1FA75 LIGHT BLUE HEART, released in Unicode 15.0 and Emoji 15.0 in 2022, with the pink heart and grey heart; TechCrunch reported in February 2023 that it was coming to iPhones with iOS 16.4. It was proposed by Jennifer Daniel (L2/21-202). Unicode’s keywords for it include blue, cyan, light, sky and teal, and cute and like. Emojipedia says it is frequently used alongside other hearts, and, like the other coloured hearts, for people, places, groups and things of the same colour. Daniel’s proposal named the flags it was meant for: countries including Argentina, Botswana and Kazakhstan, regions such as Bavaria, Antarctica, and identity flags such as the pansexual flag, whose light blue stripe had no heart to match it.

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Why a second blue

The proposal gave a reason from language: Russian and Korean have no single basic word for blue, and divide it into dark and light. Unicode’s 2021 paper on heart colours added a reason from design: most vendors drew the purple heart too close to blue and the blue heart too close to cyan, leaving a gap between blue and green.

Look-alikes

💙 blue heart is the darker one, and Unicode’s chart cross-refers the two. They can be hard to tell apart where a vendor’s 💙 is already light: Dictionary.com notes that X’s blue heart is a lighter shade than Apple’s.