🖤 Black Heart

🖤 Black Heart has three quite separate uses. It expresses mourning and emptiness; it signals a dark or gothic aesthetic; and it is chosen purely because black matches a profile's colour scheme.

Read it in context. On its own in a bio it is usually stylistic. Alongside 💔 and 🥀 it is more likely to be about how someone feels.

• 🖤 as a quiet mark of respect.

The black heart arrived in 2016 with Unicode 9 and quickly became the mark of a particular stance: dark humour, grief, and belonging to goth and metal culture. In Western mourning customs black is the colour of loss, which is why 🖤 often appears under obituaries.

Since 2020 it has also been used widely in expressions of solidarity with Black Lives Matter. As with many signs, meaning depends almost entirely on context.

• 🖤🩶 – Black Heart and Grey Heart
• 🖤💚 – Black Heart with Green Heart
• 🖤🩷 – Black Heart plus Pink Heart
• 🖤💙 – Black Heart and Blue Heart
• 🖤🤍 – Black Heart with White Heart
• 🖤❤️ – Black Heart plus Red Heart
• 🖤🤎 – Black Heart and Brown Heart
• 🖤💛 – Black Heart with Yellow Heart

Easy to mix up with 🩶 Grey Heart, 💚 Green Heart or 🩷 Pink Heart. They look alike but do not mean the same thing – when in doubt, check the name.