Try Black Heart emoji
Edit the text, then change the size.
Meaning & usage
What does the Black Heart emoji mean?
Dark humour, grief or an aesthetic preference for the moody.
Dark, understated affection or a moody aesthetic. Depending on context it can signal grief, goth style, dry humour or loyalty without overt sentimentality.
How to use 🖤 naturally
Goth and minimalist styling, mourning posts.
Heart emoji express affection, support or enthusiasm, but colour and decoration change the intensity. The same heart can feel romantic with a partner and warmly platonic with a close friend.
From standard to slang
The history of 🖤
- 2016
First defined as emoji
According to Unicode’s Emoji Versions data, Black Heart was first defined as emoji in Emoji 3.0, dated 2016. Part of the rapid mid-decade expansion beyond the original mobile set.
- Before the keyboard
Its visual roots
The heart shape filled in black. It arrived in 2016 with no assigned emotional meaning, and grief, goth aesthetics and dark humour all attached themselves afterwards.
- Today
How its use evolved
Goth and minimalist styling, mourning posts.
Dates follow Unicode’s official Emoji Versions chart. Versions before Emoji 1.0 are labelled retrospectively. See the history of emoji.
In conversation
Examples of 🖤 in messages
These examples show the emoji in complete messages, where the words make its intended tone easier to read.
That all-black outfit is perfect 🖤
Dark humour is how we cope 🖤
Thinking of you today 🖤
When to use it
Using 🖤 clearly
Goth and minimalist styling, mourning posts. It lands as dark or goth when the rest of the message supports that reading, and it is the surrounding words that do the deciding — so in a sensitive, professional or cross-cultural conversation, say the thing outright as well.
Common questions
About the black heart emoji
What does 🖤 mean in a text message?
Dark humour, grief or an aesthetic preference for the moody. Dark, understated affection or a moody aesthetic. Depending on context it can signal grief, goth style, dry humour or loyalty without overt sentimentality.
Is 🖤 always positive?
Not always. Its usual readings are dark, goth, mourning, and irony or the relationship between the people can flip any of them.
Why does 🖤 look different on another device?
U+1F5A4 identifies the emoji; the picture is a font, drawn separately by Apple, Google, Microsoft and Samsung. Only the artwork changes, never the character.
How do I copy and paste the black heart emoji?
Use the copy button at the top of this page. 🖤 is a character, not an image, so it pastes into messages, captions and filenames as ordinary text.
When was the black heart emoji introduced?
Unicode’s Emoji Versions data first records 🖤 as emoji in Emoji 3.0, dated 2016. Early emoji version numbers can be retrospective, so this date describes its place in the standardised emoji set rather than the first-ever appearance of the underlying symbol.
For developers
🖤 in code
Every value below is generated from the character itself, so it stays correct even where a file encoding cannot hold the emoji directly.
| Format | Value | When to use it | Copy |
|---|---|---|---|
| Unicode | U+1F5A4 | The standard reference. Use it to search a character map or a spec. | |
| HTML (hex) | 🖤 | For HTML and XML. Safe in files that are not saved as UTF-8. | |
| HTML (decimal) | 🖤 | The same reference in decimal. Both render identically. | |
| CSS | \1F5A4 | For the content property. Keep the quotes around the whole value. | |
| JavaScript | \u{1F5A4} | A string-literal escape. Needs the u flag inside a regular expression. | |
| URL-encoded | %F0%9F%96%A4 | Percent-encoded UTF-8, for query strings and API requests. |
Reference card
Emoji details
- Unicode
- U+1F5A4
- Category
- Hearts & Love
- Also known as
- darkgothmourning
Put it in a message
When 🖤 is the right choice
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