Heart Symbols and Heart Text Faces: The Complete Set
There are more heart characters than most people realise, and the choice between them changes the tone more than the size of the gesture.
The text symbols
♡ White Heart Suit — hollow, light, reads as soft and understated. The most used in aesthetic layouts. ♥ Black Heart Suit — filled, heavier, reads as strong and direct. ❤ Heavy Black Heart — filled and larger. On many phones this now renders as a colour emoji rather than text, which is worth knowing if you want it to stay monochrome. ❥ Rotated Heavy Black Heart Bullet — angled, decorative. ❦ ❧ Floral Hearts — ornamental, used as dividers rather than as hearts. ෆ — a Sinhala letter widely adopted as a small soft heart in aesthetic layouts. ♡̸ — a struck-through heart, meaning heartbreak.
The important practical distinction is that ♡ and ♥ are drawn by the text font, so they take the colour of the surrounding text and look identical everywhere. ❤️ with the emoji variation selector is separate colour artwork that differs by platform.
Hollow or filled
This is a real choice, not a cosmetic one.
♡ reads as gentle. It suits bios, soft aesthetics, affection that is not being announced. It is the default in most aesthetic layouts because it decorates without shouting.
♥ reads as committed. It suits declarations, and it holds up better at small sizes because the filled shape stays visible where the outline can disappear.
Heart text faces
Hearts appear in faces in two distinct ways, and they mean different things.
Beside the face — (◕‿◕) ♡ — affection directed outward. The face is happy and the heart is what it is feeling about.
As the eyes — (♡‿♡) — adoration. The substitution matters: the feeling is in how the face sees, rather than in something it is holding.
That distinction is why heart eyes faces is a separate collection from love faces and heart faces.
In the arms — ♡(◕‿◕)♡ — framing, decorative rather than expressive.
Where each works
Bios. ♡ and ෆ, used sparingly. One per line at most. Usernames. ♡ and ♥ pass on most display names; both are short enough not to eat the character limit. Messages. Any of them. In chat, emoji hearts are more common and read as warmer. Documents and spreadsheets. Text hearts only — they sort and search like text and survive PDF export.
Rendering caution
♡ and ♥ are supported essentially everywhere. ❤ increasingly renders as emoji. ෆ and the floral hearts are rarer and may show as boxes on older Android.
If the layout has to survive on unknown devices, ♡ and ♥ are the safe pair.
The colour heart problem
Emoji hearts carry meanings that vary by group — the different colours have acquired associations that are neither universal nor stable. Text hearts avoid this entirely, because there is only shape, no colour to interpret.
For anything where you want affection without a second reading, a text heart is the safer character.
Find them
The text symbols page lists every heart with its Unicode name and code point. Love faces, heart faces, heart eyes and kiss faces cover the faces, each with 200 that appear on that page only.
The variation selector
Some heart characters can render as either text or emoji depending on an invisible modifier called a variation selector. ❤ followed by U+FE0F becomes the colour emoji; ❤ followed by U+FE0E stays monochrome text.
Most tools do not expose this, which is why ❤ sometimes arrives coloured when you wanted plain. If monochrome matters, use ♡ or ♥ instead — neither has a colour emoji form, so neither can be substituted.
In documents and spreadsheets
Text hearts sort and filter like text, which makes them usable as data. A ♥ column in a spreadsheet is a filterable field; an emoji heart may not be, depending on the application.
They also survive export to PDF and paste into email without becoming an image.