Meaning, copy and paste, related heart emojis and combos.
The black heart emoji 🖤 signals dark or deadpan affection: goth and alt aesthetics, mourning, sarcasm about something terrible, or sports and brand colours. Despite the colour it is rarely hostile — most senders use it as a cooler, less gushy version of ❤️.
✍️ Written & reviewed against real usage · verified Unicode 16.0Tap to copy · pastes in WhatsApp, Instagram, anywhere
These are the real emoji characters — tap one to copy it, then paste anywhere. Because they’re text, they show up as emoji wherever you send them.
🖤 has three main jobs. First, aesthetic: it is the default heart for goth, emo, alt, streetwear and "clean girl" minimalist profiles because black matches any feed. Second, dark humour and deadpan — pairing it with something bleak ("worked 14 hours 🖤") reads as gallows-humour affection rather than anger. Third, grief and solidarity, where it stands in for mourning, black ribbons, or movements that adopted black as a colour. On TikTok it is also the low-effort "I love this but I am not going to be soft about it" heart, and in fandoms it simply codes a member or character whose colour is black.
A cooler, lower-stakes heart than ❤️. It says I like you without the commitment a red heart implies — common in early talking stages.
Under a memorial post or bad news, 🖤 reads as condolence and quiet support, the emoji equivalent of a black ribbon.
Attached to something bleak or self-deprecating, it flips the message into a joke: I am fine, this is funny, do not worry.
Bios, playlists, alt or streetwear feeds and team colours. Here the colour is styling, not emotion — it just matches the vibe.
When a girl sends 🖤 it is almost never hostile. Most often it is aesthetic-first — black is her palette, so every heart she sends is black, and it carries the same warmth a red heart would. In a talking stage it is usually a deliberately cooler heart: real affection with the intensity dialled down so she is not the one being too much first. It can also mean sympathy on a sad post, or dark humour when paired with something bleak. From a guy the read is the same, with the extra flavour that many men default to 🖤 because a red heart feels too committed. The one signal worth noticing is a switch: if someone sent ❤️ for weeks and suddenly only sends 🖤, that cooling is worth a conversation — a single 🖤 is not.
Black heart 🖤 and White heart 🤍 look closely related and get swapped constantly, but they land differently in a message. Here is what separates them, so you send the one you actually mean.
Edgy, deadpan, aesthetic or mourning. A cooler stand-in for ❤️ that avoids sounding too soft.
Pure, gentle and sincere. Used for weddings, close friendships and condolences where softness is the point.
It’s the same character everywhere — each platform just draws it in its own style. Here are three open emoji sets side by side, plus how your own device renders it:
| Platform | How it differs |
|---|---|
| Apple | A flat matte black heart with a soft grey highlight along the top-left lobe. |
| Solid near-black heart with a slight blue-grey tint, matching the Noto colour-heart set. | |
| Samsung | Glossy black heart with a stronger white specular highlight than Apple's. |
| Microsoft | Flat black heart with a thin lighter outline so it stays visible on dark backgrounds. |
| Simple flat black heart, no gradient; on dark mode it can visually merge with the bubble. |
Apple, Samsung and WhatsApp draw their own proprietary versions, which we don’t redistribute — the notes above describe how they differ. Open sets shown under their licences: Twemoji (CC-BY 4.0), Noto Emoji (Apache 2.0), OpenMoji (CC BY-SA 4.0).
The black heart emoji 🖤 is not always read the way you intend it. These three situations change what 🖤 signals, and knowing them keeps you from sending the wrong message.
Quick answers to what people ask most about the black heart emoji 🖤 — what it means in a text, who tends to send it, and how to copy it onto your own keyboard.
Usually genuine affection sent in a cooler, less gushy way, or simply the heart that matches her aesthetic. It only signals distance if she previously used red or pink hearts and abruptly switched.
No. Unicode names it Black Heart with no negative meaning, and in practice it reads as dark humour, mourning, or style. Negativity comes from the surrounding words, not the emoji.
🤍 white heart reads as pure, soft, wedding-and-condolence gentle. 🖤 black heart reads as edgy, deadpan or grieving. They are often sent together as a matching monochrome pair.
Not by itself. Some people do use it to mark a low mood, especially with 🥀 or a sad-song caption, but on its own it is far more often aesthetic or humorous. Look at the message, not the colour.
On TikTok it is the standard alt, goth and dark-academia heart, and a low-key way to say I love this in comments without sounding overly enthusiastic. It also tags black-coded members in fandom edits.
It was approved in Unicode 9.0 in 2016 as U+1F5A4, alongside Emoji 3.0. That is why very old devices and some legacy systems show it as a blank box.
If 🖤 came up in a conversation, these are the emoji people most often look up next — each one explained the same way, with meanings you can actually use and characters you can copy.