What Does The White Heart Emoji Mean?
Want to find out what the White Heart emoji can mean? Read this week's Emoji of the Week, where we highlight emojis with layered lore, nuanced meanings, and personality beyond just their pixels.
Somewhere over the rainbow lies an emoji with a subtle aesthetic and expansive emotional range. The Emojipedia Emoji of the Week is the 🤍 White Heart emoji.
In a world of bold, loud, attention-grabbing emojis, it’s one that doesn’t ooze drama and intrigue. Instead, it evokes a pristine softness, like a hug from a friend with a freshly laundered T-shirt or a cozy, quiet, snowy day, sipping herbal tea with a splash of oat milk.
@emojipediaofficial The #EmojiOfTheWeek has us all up in our feels... 🤍 #emoji #emojimeanings #hearts #love #peace #emotions #internetculture #netflixadolescence ♬ Storytelling - Adriel
🤍 MEANING OF THE WHITE HEART EMOJI
For those who dabble in heart emoji color semantics, you might already know some of the most common use cases for the 🤍 White Heart emoji.
It represents arguably the deepest, purest, most wholesome, untainted love—whether romantic, platonic, familial, or something in between.
It’s like an “I love you,” “I’m here for you,” and “It’s gonna be okay,” wrapping you up in one big blanket. Think of it like an emotional support emoji.
The 🤍 White Heart with its muted palette is a common choice to show solidarity, well wishes, mourning, and condolences in times of grief, loss, or hardship. You might see it often in memorials or tributes to someone who’s passed away.
It’s often paired, too, with emojis associated with peace like the 🕊️ Dove or the ☮️ Peace Symbol to show support for pacifist causes and movements.
It’s no surprise, either, that because its color is associated with bridal dresses, you’re likely to see this emoji in online and digital exchanges paired with other emojis representing weddings like the 👰 Person With Veil, the 🤵 Person in Tuxedo, the 💍 Ring, the 💐 Bouquet, or the 💒 Wedding emojis—a much more celebratory counterpart to its more somber use cases.
❤️ HEART EMOJI REPURPOSING
Trying to pinpoint an exact meaning or use case for the 🤍 White Heart emoji sparks an often-ignited discussion around emoji codes and repurposing when emojis take on or are assigned alternate meanings beyond their surface-level interpretations.
The Netflix drama Adolescence fleshes out this idea, laying out the encrypted codes embedded in the emojis the show says teens are allegedly using in their texting.
If you’ve seen the show, you know that according to one teenage character’s explanation, hearts of various colors—namely the ❤️ Red Heart, the 💜 Purple Heart, the Yellow Heart, the Pink Heart, and the 🧡 Orange Heart—serve as stand-ins and euphemisms for different types of relationship-defining messages, sometimes with pubescent and suggestive undertones.
But heart emojis haven’t been imbued only with teenage hormonal angst. With a slight stretch of the imagination, hearts of every color can represent causes, identities, and affiliations all around the internet and beyond.
Often, supporters of sports teams combine colored heart emojis to represent their favorite team or school colors, like how fans of the Florida Gators were quick to paint the digital court with 💙 Blue and 🧡 Orange Heart emojis after the team’s NCAA March Madness men’s basketball victory.
💙 Blue Heart emojis on their own can be dependable choices for brands to show a positive spirit without making things overly romantic since their color is cooler and arguably more neutral. You might also see them paired with white hearts in expressions of grief for this reason.
There’s the 💚 Green Heart for environmentalist movements, or St. Patrick’s Day pride, for example, or for Charli XCX and the entire ecosystem of “Brat.”
And stans of K-Pop supergroup BTS have the 💜 Purple Heart to express their fandom—the same emoji also used to represent the Purple Heart medal conferred on wounded or killed soldiers in the U.S. military.
Emoji repurposing might even be happening in reverse with the ❤️ Red Heart, which some argue has become so universal that it has lost its meaning altogether.
But when it comes to the light, airy 🤍 White Heart, it’s clear it has its special place in the family—the solemn, reflective one holding space among all the passionate ❤️🔥 Flaming, 💓 Beating, and 💔 Broken hearts.
Stay tuned next week for another Emoji of the Week.