Broken Heart Emoji

A red heart split down the middle into two pieces. It represents heartbreak, loss, disappointment, and emotional pain. There's no ambiguity here: 💔 means something hurts.

The broken heart is one of the oldest visual metaphors in Western culture. Medieval manuscripts from the 13th century showed lovers exchanging hearts, and the concept of a heart that could shatter from grief predates the printing press. The emoji carries all of that cultural weight in a single character.

The emoji itself was part of NTT DoCoMo's original pictograph set in 1999, making it one of the earliest emojis ever designed. It was included in Unicode 6.0 in 2010 and standardized in Emoji 1.0 in 2015.

In February 2025, the ironic pattern reached its comic peak. TikToker @ybgtway posted that 💔 had "lowkey started to become too mainstream," nominating 🥀 as the replacement. The clip hit 39,200 likes in four days. Over the next week the meme cycled: 🥀 gave way to 🪫, 🪫 to 🍂, each successor immediately declared "the meta" and retired. The joke was aimed at the performative use of 💔 by fandoms of late rapper XXXTentacion, but the wider read is sharper: emojis are starting to behave like microtrends, cycling out the moment they feel earnest.

On Twitter/X and Instagram, 💔 shows up after breakups, bad news, disappointing outcomes, and any situation involving emotional pain. It's the default emoji for heartbreak captions: "it's over 💔" or "my heart 💔."

On TikTok, 💔 is central to breakup content, sad edits, and "story time" videos about failed relationships. The hashtag #heartbreak consistently features 💔 as the visual anchor.

In texting, 💔 can be sincere or exaggerated depending on context. "She left me 💔" is real pain. "They were out of oat milk 💔" is performative sadness. The emoji works in both registers because heartbreak is both a genuine emotion and a dramatic style.

In K-pop and fandom contexts, 💔 appears when a fan's favorite group disbands, when a member enlists in military service, or when dating rumors disrupt parasocial relationships. Fandom 💔 is its own emotional category.

The broken heart as a visual concept predates digital communication by centuries. In 13th-century French manuscripts, hearts were shown being exchanged between lovers. By the late Middle Ages, the idea that a heart could "break" from grief was established in European literature and art. The wounded heart (pierced by Cupid's arrow) and the broken heart (split in two) became distinct visual traditions.

The emoji version was designed in Japan. NTT DoCoMo included a broken heart in their original 1999 pictograph set, the same batch that gave us most of the face emojis. It was standardized in Unicode 6.0 (2010) as U+1F494U+1F494 BROKEN HEART.

The pairing of 💔 with ❤️‍🩹 (mending heart, added in 2021) created the first emoji narrative arc: a heart that breaks and then heals. The two emojis together (💔→❤️‍🩹) tell a story that words would take a paragraph to express.

Part of Unicode 6.0 (2010) as U+1F494U+1F494 BROKEN HEART. Added to Emoji 1.0 in 2015. Part of the Smileys & Emotion category, heart subcategory. CLDR short name: "broken heart." Keywords: break, broken, heart.

1. 1999NTT DoCoMo includes broken heart in original Japanese carrier emoji set
2. 2010Standardized in Unicode 6.0 as U+1F494 BROKEN HEART
3. 2015Added to Emoji 1.0↗
4. 2021❤️‍🩹 Mending Heart added in Emoji 13.1, creating the break→heal narrative pair

• 💸
  $27.5B Valentine's spend (2025): [NRF / Prosper survey of 7,500 US consumers](https://nrf.com/media-center/press-releases/nrf-survey-valentine-s-day-spending-reaches-record-27-5-billion). Average per celebrant: $188.81. Jewelry leads at $6.5B, then evenings out $5.4B, flowers $2.9B, candy $2.5B, cards $1.4B. The candy line is the one that flips on Feb 15: chocolate boxes hit ~50% off the next morning, which is a measurable bump in singles' candy purchases.
• 🎧
  870,884 breakup playlists on Spotify: Across the platform, [Spotify counts ~870,884 user-made breakup playlists](https://www.newsweek.com/spotify-valentines-day-popular-most-streamed-love-songs-breakup-tracks-1677578) and over 200,000 created in 2023 alone. Anti-Valentines Day, Sad hour, Sad Bops, crying on the dancefloor, and villain mode are the editorial titles repeatedly cited. Demographic peak: 18-24, where Feb 14 streaming of breakup playlists exceeds love playlists.
• 📈
  Breakup tracks earn $800K more than love tracks: [Rolling Out / February 2026 study](https://rollingout.com/2026/02/27/breakup-song-earn-more-than-love-ballads/): the average breakup song accumulates ~2.16B lifetime streams vs ~1.97B for love songs. The catharsis-revisit cycle (same song played dozens of times during emotional crises, vs love songs played at weddings once) explains the gap. Olivia Rodrigo's [drivers license](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Drivers_License_(song)) is the canonical 2021 example: 15.17M streams in its first 24 hours.
• 📉
  Collaborative-playlist undo as the new breakup chore: Spotify Wrapped 2024 surfaced the 'shared playlist still active 8 months after breakup' pattern; the platform [doesn't auto-remove a co-owner](https://community.spotify.com/t5/Music-Exchange/Breakup-Playlist/td-p/4768789) when a relationship ends. The chore of pulling tracks one by one became its own TikTok subgenre, and the median delay between breakup and full unsharing surfaced in user threads as several months, not weeks.
• 🍫
  The Feb 15 chocolate clearance: [Talkbusiness reporting](https://talkbusiness.net/2025/02/valentines-day-spending-estimated-to-top-27-5-billion/) on the NRF data noted the 24-hour collapse of heart-shaped chocolate inventory after Feb 14. Hallmark and Russell Stover both run a planned ~50% markdown the next morning; same-store grocery candy revenue spikes again as singles buy half-price chocolate without the holiday pressure. The 💔 caption follows: 'me on Feb 15 buying half-price chocolate 💔'.

• •💔 was part of NTT DoCoMo's original 1999 emoji set, making it one of the oldest emoji designs in existence.
• •The broken heart concept in Western art dates back to medieval manuscripts where hearts were exchanged between lovers. A "broken" heart, split in two from grief, was an established visual metaphor centuries before digital communication.
• •The pairing of 💔 with ❤️‍🩹 (mending heart, added 2021) created the first emoji narrative arc: break → heal.
• •In early 2025, ironic usage of 💔 spiked on TikTok and X, with people using it for trivial disappointments. The pattern mirrors how 😭 and 💀 were repurposed from sincere emotion to sarcastic overreaction.
• •French-language social media uses 💔 four times more often than other languages. France leads global heart emoji usage overall, and the culture of romantic expression extends naturally to heartbreak.
• •The Chadwick Boseman death announcement became the most-liked tweet ever (6+ million likes), and 💔 dominated the replies. It was one of the largest single-event spikes in broken heart emoji usage in the platform's history.
• •Takotsubo cardiomyopathy, literally "broken heart syndrome," is a real cardiac condition triggered by sudden grief or stress. A 2024 AHA study of 200,000 U.S. hospitalizations found a 6.5% mortality rate, unchanged across 2016-2020. Women get it 9x more often, but men die from it at twice the rate.
• •Olivia Rodrigo's "drivers license" dropped January 8, 2021) and broke the Spotify single-day streaming record for a non-holiday song with 15.17 million streams in 24 hours. 💔 usage on Twitter spiked in lockstep. It's one of the cleanest examples of a single song triggering an emoji-level cultural moment.
• •The pre-emoji broken heart on PC lived inside MSN Messenger as `(U)`, paired with (L)(L) for the full red heart. The shortcut pair shaped an entire generation's default language for romantic texting in the 2000s before Unicode 6.0 standardized 💔 in 2010. Yahoo Messenger users typed =((=(( for the same effect.
• •On April 17, 2020, Facebook launched a "Care" reaction, a smiley hugging a heart, as its first new reaction since the original six shipped in 2015. It was a platform-level response to COVID-era heartbreak, giving users an empathy button that didn't require picking between 💔 and 😢. Messenger got a pulsating heart instead. It remains Facebook's only non-emotion reaction, sitting between the 👍 and the 😢 in the reactions bar.

• •Sending 💔 to an ex during a no-contact period. The emoji reopens the emotional wound even if you didn't intend it to. If you're broken-hearted, express it elsewhere.
• •Reacting with 💔 to someone's happy announcement. "I got engaged!" → 💔 reads as jealousy, not congratulations. Use 🎉 or ❤️ instead.
• •Using 💔 too frequently. If every minor setback gets a 💔, the emoji loses its power for genuine heartbreak. Save it for real pain.

• •Emojipedia's "What Every Heart Emoji Really Means" guide places 💔 at the extreme negative end of the heart emoji spectrum, describing it as the universal symbol for heartbreak that transcends language and culture.
• •Multiple songs are literally titled "Broken Heart Emoji," including tracks by Eazy Mac & Golden Bsp (2019), JayTheFC (2022), and J'sar (2022). The emoji has become a music title template for songs about digital-age heartbreak.
• •The 💔→❤️‍🩹 narrative pair (introduced when the mending heart was added in 2021) was covered by emoji enthusiasts as the first emoji "story arc." Two characters, placed in sequence, tell a complete emotional journey from heartbreak to healing.
• •In early 2025, Emojipedia documented a spike in ironic 💔 usage across TikTok and X, where people exaggerated minor disappointments with the same emoji normally reserved for genuine heartbreak.

• •U+1F494U+1F494. No variation selector needed.
• •On Slack: :broken_heart::broken_heart:. On GitHub: :broken_heart::broken_heart:. On Discord: :broken_heart::broken_heart:.
• •💔 is one of the most consistently rendered emojis across platforms. Every vendor shows a red heart split in two. There's very little design variation to worry about.
• •If building sentiment analysis, 💔 is strongly negative. Weight it accordingly. But watch for ironic usage (preceded by trivial statements) where the actual sentiment is humorous rather than sad.

See the full Emoji Developer Tools guide for regex patterns, encoding helpers, and more.