Orange heart 🧡

How to read it

🧡 is U+1F9E1 ORANGE HEART, approved in Unicode 10.0 in 2017; Emojipedia lists it in Emoji 5.0 the same year. It exists because people asked for it. Paul D. Hunt’s proposal to Unicode (L2/16-124, May 2016) said “the absence of an orange heart is quite strongly felt”, and showed Apple’s App Store accounts on social media remarking on the gap. Hunt expected it to carry a strong positive feeling, “especially in connection with orange colored objects”. That is how Dictionary.com records it being used: for love and support of things related to orange, from the season of fall to sports teams that wear it, such as the Clemson Tigers. Emojipedia says it is often used alongside other coloured hearts, and Unicode’s keywords for it are only heart and orange, besides the number 143.

Also searched as: 🧡, orange heart emoji, orange heart emoji meaning, what does the orange heart emoji mean.

Why it was added

Hunt’s proposal counted the heart emoji then in use on Twitter, using the site emojitracker: the red heart was 3rd, purple 33rd, blue 40th, yellow 72nd and green 81st, all in the top tenth of tracked emoji. He listed what orange stands for in different settings, among them autumn leaves and sports teams, and pointed out that people wanting a rainbow of hearts could not make one. Without an orange heart, he wrote, people fell back on the red or yellow heart as nearest in colour, or on an orange object such as 🍊 tangerine or 🎃 jack-o-lantern. One of his examples was a Facebook post celebrating the US Supreme Court’s ruling for marriage equality, with a jack-o-lantern standing in for the missing orange heart.

Team and national colours

Emojipedia’s David Doochin gives the example of Florida Gators fans posting 💙 and 🧡 after the team’s March Madness win. Unicode’s light blue heart proposal (L2/21-202) notes that the national colour of the Netherlands is orange, and gives 🧡 rather than the flag’s red, white and blue as the way to show it.

The “Adolescence” list

The Netflix drama Adolescence (2025) gave orange as “You’re gonna be fine” in a list of supposed teenage heart codes; Emojipedia disputes that any colour has such a fixed meaning (see red heart).