🤍 White Heart

What the white heart means

Pure, clean love. For sincere affection and new beginnings.

Common ways people use it

• Pure affection
• Aesthetic bios
• Support messages

Purity, minimalism and mourning

White Heart was added in Unicode 12.0 in 2019, one of the most recent. It reads as pure, simple and understated, and it is a staple of minimalist and monochrome profile aesthetics.

It is also the conventional heart for condolence in many contexts, where white carries the association of mourning - a reading the black heart shares but muddies with its aesthetic use.

A rendering problem

It is the one heart with a real visibility issue. Most vendors draw it as a white or near-white shape with a thin outline, which nearly disappears against Discord's light theme.

For anything that must be seen by everyone, it is the weakest choice in the set despite being visually the most striking on dark backgrounds.

In server configuration

It is popular in minimalist server designs as a channel and role prefix, where its understatement is the intended effect.

It is the weakest functional marker in the heart set, because most vendors draw it near-white and it effectively disappears for members on Discord's light theme.

The light theme problem

Most vendors draw it white with a thin outline, and against Discord's light theme that outline is nearly all that is visible.

It is the one heart that should not be used for anything a member has to find or click, however well it suits a dark-theme design.

The last of the plain colours

White Heart arrived in Unicode 12.0 in 2019, completing the plain-colour set that began with the carrier hearts nearly two decades earlier.

Its proposal cited both the minimalist aesthetic use and the mourning convention, which is why it carries two quite different meanings from the start rather than acquiring one later.

It is also the newest heart other than pink, so the same support caveat applies on very old devices.

Technical details

Codepoint

U+1F90D

Character

🤍

As a standard Unicode emoji rather than a Discord custom emoji, this renders anywhere text does and needs no server or Nitro. Each platform draws it with its own emoji font, so the artwork differs between Android, iOS, Windows and Mac while the character and its meaning stay identical.

Questions about the white heart