Pink heart 🩷

How to read it

🩷 is U+1FA77 PINK HEART, released in Unicode 15.0 on 13 September 2022 and in Emoji 15.0, and TechCrunch reported in February 2023 that it was coming to iPhones with iOS 16.4, expected in March or April. Its proposal (L2/21-203) is by Jennifer Daniel and Lauren Gawne, first dated January 2020. Emojipedia says that for many years before 2022 the plain pink heart was one of the world’s most frequently requested emoji, and that it is used for love, friendship, feelings of warmth and the colour pink. Unicode’s keywords for it lean towards the cute: adorable, cute, like, love, pink, special and sweet. It is often used beside other hearts, which is what its proposers expected.

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Why it took until 2022

Pink hearts were in emoji long before 🩷, just not as a plain heart. The proposal notes that the Japanese carriers KDDI and SoftBank had pink hearts in their original sets, and that as recently as 2017 Android drew the red heart pink. Emojipedia lists eight older emoji that several platforms draw with pink hearts, among them 💖 sparkling heart, 💕 two hearts and 💗 growing heart. One objection had been raised at Unicode, the proposal says: that the concept of “pink” is not as universal as other colours. Unicode’s 2021 paper on heart colours answered it from colour research. Berlin and Kay’s study of basic colour terms finds at most eleven across languages, and of those the hearts lacked only pink and grey. The proposers expected 🩷 to be used for the bisexual flag, which has a pink stripe, for adornment in affectionate messages (“It’s so cuuuuuuuute”), and for pink things, such as “Baby Girl”.

Look-alikes

💕 two hearts is not a pink heart in the same sense. On Snapchat it has its own meaning: its support page says pink hearts beside a friend mean the two have been each other’s #1 Best Friend for two months in a row. The Netflix drama Adolescence (2025) gave 🩷 as “I’m interested, but not in sex”; Emojipedia disputes that heart colours carry fixed codes (see red heart).