Diamond With A Dot Emoji

A four-petaled shape with a dot in the middle, filed under the unromantic Unicode name "Diamond Shape with a Dot Inside." That name is the problem. The original was a flower. Specifically, it started life as a pixelated hydrangea (ajisai) in NTT DoCoMo's 1999 emoji set, designed by Shigetaka Kurita on a 12x12 grid. When the Unicode Consortium standardized emoji in Unicode 6.0 (October 2010), they grouped it with geometric shapes and gave it a clinical name, which locked the flower reading out of most dictionaries. Apple then redrew it in iOS 6, March 2012 as a blue, glassy, faceted thing that looks more like a cut gem than a petal. That Apple interpretation became the default everywhere outside Japan.

So 💠 has two lives at once. In Japan, it still reads as a "cute flower" used the way Western internet uses ✨ or 💖: to compliment something as kawaii, to sparkle up a post, or to flag something precious. In the West, it reads as a blue diamond, a rarity symbol, or (more commonly) a decorative bullet point. Most people who use it aren't thinking about either reading. They just needed a bullet point that wasn't a dash.

You see 💠 most often where someone is formatting prose. LinkedIn posts use it as a pretty bullet for career pivots and "lessons learned" lists. Twitter/X threads use it to break up steps in a how-to. Instagram bios use it as a separator between name and pronouns. Kawaii aesthetic profiles on TikTok and Tumblr use it as a sparkle, often next to 🌸 or 🎀. It's not in the top 100 emojis anywhere, and Emojipedia's usage stats don't give it its own line, but it survives because it fills a specific typographic niche: the decorative bullet point. When people search for a bullet prettier than •• and bluer than 🔹, they find 💠.

Japanese and East Asian social media treat it differently. There, it retains the kawaii-flower reading, so you'll see it sprinkled through profile descriptions, Line stickers, and decorative text art. The split is almost invisible because the shape works either way, but a Japanese user posting 💠✨ is saying "so cute," while an American user posting 💠 in a thread is saying "next bullet point."

💠 is one of the 176 original emojis Shigetaka Kurita designed for NTT DoCoMo's i-mode pager service in 1999, now held in MoMA's permanent collection. Kurita drew them on a 12x12 pixel grid, borrowing from weather icons, street signs, manga's visual shorthand (called manpu), and Japanese seasonal imagery. In that set, 💠 was a tiny hydrangea (ajisai), a flower strongly associated in Japan with June rain, mono no aware, and early summer.

What got lost is the name. When the Unicode Consortium standardized emoji in version 6.0 in October 2010, this character was filed under "Miscellaneous Symbols and Pictographs" and given the English name "Diamond Shape with a Dot Inside." No "flower," no "hydrangea," no "kawaii." That naming choice is why most English-language emoji references describe 💠 as a geometric shape, and why most English-speaking users have never heard it's a flower. Apple's iOS 6 design in March 2012 sealed the reinterpretation: they drew it as a shiny blue glass diamond with a lighter diamond-shaped highlight in the middle. That glass-diamond design became the de facto standard. Google's Noto set still leans floral; Microsoft went minimalist. But the name stuck, and the ajisai quietly receded.

1. 1999DoCoMo: Shigetaka Kurita includes a 12x12 pixel hydrangea in the original i-mode emoji set
2. 2010Unicode: Approved as part of Unicode 6.0 under the name 'Diamond Shape with a Dot Inside'
3. 2012Apple: iOS 6 reinterprets the flower as a shiny blue glass diamond, shifting the global reading
4. 2015Emoji 1.0: Added to the Emoji 1.0 standard keyboard-wide
5. 2016MoMA: Kurita's original 176-emoji set enters MoMA's permanent collection
6. 2025DoCoMo: Docomo officially retires its legacy emoji set, closing the original lineage

• •💠 started as a hydrangea, not a diamond. Shigetaka Kurita's 1999 DoCoMo design was a pixelated flower; the Unicode name "Diamond Shape with a Dot Inside" came eleven years later and overrode the original meaning in English.
• •The whole original 176-emoji DoCoMo set, including 💠, is in the permanent collection of the Museum of Modern Art in New York, acquired in 2016.
• •Apple's iOS 6 redesign in March 2012 is the reason most people think 💠 is a gem. Before that, it was more obviously flower-shaped on Japanese phones.
• •In Japanese internet culture, ajisai (hydrangea) is strongly associated with June rain and the tsuyu (plum rain) season. So 💠 carries a quiet seasonal hint for Japanese readers that's totally invisible to English-speaking ones.
• •Among the 3,953 emojis in the current Unicode Standard, 💠 is one of the least-searched geometric shapes in Emojipedia traffic, out-ranked by its plainer siblings 🔷 and 🔹.
• •DoCoMo officially discontinued its emoji set in 2025, ending the direct lineage of the original hydrangea design after 26 years.
• •Kurita drew the 1999 set on a 12x12 pixel grid, meaning the original 💠 had only 144 pixels to work with. Every detail, including the center dot, was placed by hand.