Anatomical Heart Emoji

A realistic red human heart with visible veins and arteries. 🫀 is the anatomically accurate alternative to ❤️. Where ❤️ is a symbol, 🫀 is an organ. That distinction is the whole point.

Approved in Unicode 13.0 in January 2020 and released on March 10, 2020, the Anatomical Heart was part of a 117-emoji batch that also brought 🫁 Lungs and 🦷 Tooth. The timing was cruelly perfect: 🫀 landed on phones one day before the WHO called COVID-19 a pandemic, and suddenly every hospital, every health agency, and every cardiology-forward account had a new tool.

🫀 carries two main uses. First, medical and scientific: cardiology discussions, ER and hospital accounts, health education, post-op recovery content. Second, emotional: people reach for it to signal a deeper, more raw kind of love than ❤️ conveys. "I love you with my whole 🫀" hits different than "I love you ❤️" because the anatomical version strips away the symbol and points at the real, messy, beating organ in your chest.

Some younger users treat it as an edgy substitute for the red heart, choosing 🫀 because it feels less "basic." Others find it too graphic for romance. The emoji really does split readers, which is part of why it's so expressive.

Texting. 🫀 signals intensity. People use it when ❤️ feels too generic or saccharine. "You have my whole 🫀" is more vulnerable than "you have my whole ❤️" because the anatomical version says "I mean the literal organ." It's also the preferred heart for goth-adjacent, alt, and dark-academia aesthetics that find the polished red heart too chipper.

Medical and health. Cardiologists, nurses, health educators, EMTs, and medical students use 🫀 literally. "Heart health awareness 🫀," "cardiology rotation 🫀," "ran my first code 🫀" — it's the ER-shift caption emoji. Hospital campaigns for World Heart Day (September 29) depend on it.

TikTok and social media. 🫀 appears in deep emotional content, mental-health posts, and raw vulnerability moments. It's the "I'm being real right now" heart. Gen Z uses it with 👁️👄👁️ energy — a kind of seriousness that knows it's also a little theatrical.

The ick factor. Some people find 🫀 gross in romantic contexts. The visible veins and arteries don't exactly scream "romance" to everyone. If your audience is sensitive to medical imagery, default back to ❤️.

🫀 and 🫁 were proposed together in 2019 by a team of four: Dr. Shuhan He, an ER physician at Massachusetts General Hospital; Melissa Thermidor, social-media lead at NHS Blood and Transplant in the UK; Christian Kamkoff, a Columbia MFA candidate; and Jennifer 8. Lee, co-founder of Emojination and vice-chair of the Unicode Emoji Subcommittee.

The introduction happened at the Sundance Film Festival, where He met Lee and pitched his frustration. He'd spent years watching patients describe chest pain and heart issues in text messages with only the cartoon ❤️ available. Their anatomical heart proposal L2/19-150 went to Unicode in March 2019 and was approved in January 2020. Dr. He told the Boston Globe in February 2020 that he hoped the emojis would help both doctors and patients communicate symptoms more clearly.

The team's full pitch on the Medical Emoji project argues that emojis are now a primary communication mode for health behavior, and that the medical profession had a gap: zero anatomically accurate organs on the keyboard. 🫀 was the flagship fix.

1. 2019Proposal L2/19-150 submitted to Unicode by He, Thermidor, Kamkoff, and Jennifer 8. Lee. The introduction between He and Lee happened at Sundance.↗
2. 2020Unicode 13.0 approves the anatomical heart in January; Emoji 13.0 released March 10. One day later, WHO declares COVID-19 a pandemic.↗
3. 2020Apple ships 🫀 in iOS 14.2 (November); Google in Android 11; Samsung in One UI 2.5. Every major vendor converges on a red organ with blue/purple veins.↗
4. 2022Gen Z adopts 🫀 as the "I'm being real" heart on TikTok. Goth, alt, and dark-academia accounts boost it as a cooler alternative to ❤️.↗
5. 2024World Heart Federation's 2024 report puts global CVD deaths at 20.5 million annually. 🫀 anchors Heart Month (February) and World Heart Day (September 29) campaigns.↗

• •🫀 was proposed by Dr. Shuhan He, Melissa Thermidor (NHS UK), Christian Kamkoff, and Jennifer 8. Lee. The proposal was L2/19-150, submitted March 2019.
• •Cardiovascular disease is the #1 cause of death in every region of the world), killing roughly 19.8 million people in 2022 — about 32% of all global deaths.
• •10,000 people die of CVD every single day in the WHO European Region alone. 🫀 anchors most major European public-health campaigns.
• •Apple, Google, and Samsung all converged on similar designs: red heart with blue or purple veins. Microsoft's Fluent version simplifies the detailing.
• •More than half of US adults don't know heart disease is the leading cause of death despite CVD holding the top spot for 100 years. Awareness campaigns lean heavily on 🫀 to fix that.
• •The human heart beats about 100,000 times a day and pumps roughly 2,000 gallons of blood through 60,000 miles of blood vessels.
• •80% of global CVD deaths happen in low- and middle-income countries. Part of the proposal argument was that an accessible emoji supports global public-health communication, not just English-speaking wellness content.
• •World Heart Day (September 29) and American Heart Month (February) are the two biggest 🫀 spikes in the calendar.

• •Damar Hamlin's January 2023 cardiac arrest during Monday Night Football pulled 🫀 into sports-Twitter discourse; the emoji trended globally for days.
• •"Grey's Anatomy" and "The Pitt" (2025) both use 🫀 consistently in their official social accounts for ER and cardiothoracic storylines.
• •The Medical Emoji project run by the proposal team catalogs uses of 🫀 in hospital communications worldwide.
• •Mexican sacred-heart iconography (Sagrado Corazón), a fixture of Catholic folk art since the 17th century, is a direct visual ancestor of the 🫀 aesthetic.

• •🫀 is U+1FAC0U+1FAC0. Common shortcodes: :anatomical_heart::anatomical_heart: on Slack and Discord.
• •No skin-tone variants. Unicode classifies it as an object, not a person modifier.
• •Block: Symbols and Pictographs Extended-A (U+1FA70U+1FA70–U+1FAFFU+1FAFF), alongside 🫁 Lungs and most Emoji 13.0 additions.
• •Platform rendering: Apple, Google, and Samsung converge on red+blue/purple veins. Twitter's Twemoji uses a cooler red. Facebook simplifies the detailing. All versions preserve the aorta and visible chambers.

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