Purple heart 💜

How to read it

💜 is U+1F49C PURPLE HEART, approved in Unicode 6.0 in 2010 and added to Emoji 1.0 in 2015, according to Emojipedia, which notes that Android 4.4 drew it pink. Dictionary.com’s entry says it is used for love and support like other hearts, and for purple things: purple clothing, teams such as the Minnesota Vikings, Prince’s purple rain. It names two specific uses, and Emojipedia names the same two. One is BTS, whose fans and whose official Twitter account use it often. The other is the Purple Heart, the US military medal awarded for wounds received in action against an enemy, which Emojipedia describes as given to soldiers killed or wounded in combat. Unicode’s keywords for it are bestest, emotion, heart, ily, love and purple.

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“I purple you”

The phrase is V’s, the stage name of BTS singer Kim Taehyung. Newsweek reports that he coined it at the band’s 3rd Muster fan event in November 2016, as purple lights washed over the crowd: “Purple is the last color of the rainbow. Purple means I will trust and love you for a long time,” adding, “I just made it up.” Fans have used purple to show their love for BTS ever since. The effect on the emoji is measurable. Keith Broni of Emojipedia told Reader’s Digest that 💜 was the third most-used heart on Twitter in Emojipedia’s 2020 study, “all because” of the BTS fandom, and Unicode’s 2021 proposals for new hearts give BTS fans’ use of 💜, which they say made it the third most-used heart on Twitter, as one of the most dominant examples of a colour standing for an identity.

“Horny”? The Adolescence claim

The Netflix drama Adolescence (2025) had a teenage character say the purple heart means “horny”, and the line was widely repeated. Emojipedia’s reply noted that BTS fans use the same emoji to mean “I purple you”, and that no heart colour has a single correct meaning (see red heart).

Look-alikes

💙 blue heart is the one it is mixed up with. Unicode’s 2021 paper on heart colours (L2/21-075) found that most vendors drew purple too close to blue, and blue too close to cyan, and proposed shifting the blue, green and yellow hearts’ hues to spread the set out.