Growing Heart Emoji

A pink heart with concentric layers expanding outward, like a heart caught in the act of getting bigger. Most platforms show a solid pink heart with two or three lighter outlines behind it, creating a pulsing, radiating effect. It's the Grinch's heart growing three sizes, frozen mid-expansion.

💗 is the only heart emoji that represents a process rather than a state. ❤️ says "I love you" (present tense, settled). 💘 says "I just fell" (past tense, sudden). 💗 says "I'm falling" (progressive tense, in motion). The concentric rings capture love that isn't done growing yet.

Added in Unicode 6.0 (2010) as U+1F497U+1F497 GROWING HEART. Dictionary.com describes it as expressing outpourings of love, joy, pride, or any strong positive emotion that would cause your heart to swell. It's also used for sadness and sympathy, any feeling that's big enough to make your heart physically ache.

💗 thrives in moments where emotions are building. "Missing you more every day 💗" or "This song gets better every listen 💗" or "My heart when I saw the puppy 💗." It's the heart of escalation.

It's especially popular in early-stage romantic texting, where ❤️ feels like too much too soon. 💗 gives you a way to signal growing feelings without the full weight of the red heart. It's the "I'm getting there" heart, softer and more tentative than the declaration ❤️ makes.

The pink color reinforces this softness. Where ❤️ is bold and definitive, 💗 is gentle and in progress. It works between close friends, family, and in the tender phase of relationships where you want to show warmth without locking into something heavier.

On the meme side, the "Expanding Heart" format (also called "My Heart") turned 💗 into a wholesome counterpart to the Expanding Brain meme. Instead of ironic galaxy-brain takes, it lists things that make your heart rate increase, from "resting" to "exercising" to "talking to the person I adore." Where the brain meme tears down, the heart meme builds up.

💗 leans more flirty than friendly, but context matters. The "growing feelings" implication makes it one of the more emotionally loaded pink hearts. Between friends it reads as tender and warm. Between someone you're interested in, it reads as a signal that feelings are developing. The key: 💗 implies trajectory, not just a moment. Someone sending you growing hearts is saying their emotions are in motion.

• •Friendly: reacting to a wholesome post or cute animal with 💗
• •Friendly: "Love our friendship 💗" (growth applies to the friendship)
• •Could be flirty: sent alone in response to something you said or a photo
• •Likely flirty: "Every time I see you 💗" (the growing element is about you specifically)

• 🌸
  1930s: Jun'ichi Nakahara introduces the sparkling-eye style in jojōga illustration: Nakahara's lyrical-painting style (jojōga) for girls' magazines like *Himawari* puts a star-shaped highlight next to the pupil to signal emotional intensity. [Yale University Press's history](https://yalebooks.yale.edu/2025/08/11/large-eyes-pointy-chins-pointy-noses-how-manga-became-manga/) treats this as the first move in the visual grammar of "feelings drawn outside the body."
• 👁️
  1956: Macoto Takahashi makes the sparkling eye the shōjo default: Takahashi (1934-2024), ["the king of eye sparkles,"](https://www.animenewsnetwork.com/interview/2022-09-09/the-pioneer-of-shojo-style-macoto-takahashi/.189181) standardises large eyes with star highlights, flowing hair, ribbons, and floating ornaments. His 1958 *Arashi o koete* fixes the formula. Floating hearts, sparkles, and concentric rings around heads become routine vocabulary for emotion overflowing the character's body.
• 💭
  1970s: shōjo manga formalises floating-emotion morphemes: By the 24-nen Gumi generation (Hagio Moto, Yamagishi Ryōko, others), the floating-heart-near-character convention is so standard that [Wikipedia's manga-iconography page](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Manga_iconography) treats it as a reading convention: hearts indicate infatuation, rings indicate the feeling expanding past the chest. The 💗 design is essentially this convention rendered as a single character.
• 📱
  1999: Shigetaka Kurita ports the manga vocabulary into 12×12 pixels: Kurita's 176-emoji set for Docomo i-mode ([Wikipedia entry](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Shigetaka_Kurita)) deliberately mines manga visual conventions because they were already legible to Japanese teen users. Multiple heart variants ship including a growing-heart precursor.
• 🌐
  October 2010: Unicode 6.0 standardises 💗 as U+1F497 GROWING HEART: [The CLDR short name picks the present participle](https://emojipedia.org/growing-heart). "Growing," not "grown." The choice is a conscious nod to the original manga meaning: not a state, a process. The visual hits Western users with no shōjo context for the first time.
• 📖
  2017: the Expanding Heart meme makes the process literal: On September 3, 2017, Instagram user [@ryantheprogenji posts the first Expanding Heart meme](https://knowyourmeme.com/memes/my-heart): heart vibrating with progressively increased frequency next to escalating heart-rate scenarios. The wholesome counter-format to Expanding Brain restages the manga convention as a Western format. The 80-year visual arc closes a loop.

💗 emerged from the same wave of Japanese carrier emoji that gave us the entire heart emoji family. When NTT DoCoMo, KDDI, and SoftBank created emoji for Japanese phones in the late 1990s and 2000s, they kept adding heart variations because hearts were among the most-sent characters. Each carrier wanted to offer more expressive options than the competition.

The "growing" concept draws on a visual convention older than emoji: concentric circles radiating from a point to indicate expansion, movement, or energy. In manga, this pattern (sometimes called a "pulse" or "throb" effect) appears around characters experiencing overwhelming emotion. The rings say "this feeling is too big to contain."

Unicode 6.0 absorbed this in 2010 as GROWING HEART. The name is interesting because it prescribes a narrative: the heart is in the middle of something. It's not "grown heart" (completed) or "big heart" (static). It's growing, right now, as you look at it. Unicode gave this emoji a built-in time dimension that most emoji don't have.

The physical metaphor, your heart "swelling" or "growing" with emotion, appears across cultures. Dr. Seuss made it literal in How the Grinch Stole Christmas (1957): "The Grinch's small heart grew three sizes that day." That image, a heart physically expanding from emotion, is exactly what 💗 depicts.

Approved in Unicode 6.0 (2010) as U+1F497U+1F497 GROWING HEART. Part of the batch of Japanese carrier emoji absorbed into the Unicode standard. CLDR short name: "growing heart." Added to Emoji 1.0 in 2015. The name uses the present participle "growing" rather than "grown" or "big," baking a narrative of ongoing expansion into the emoji's identity.

The "heart swelling with emotion" metaphor is remarkably universal. English speakers say "my heart grew" or "it makes my heart swell." Japanese has 胸が熱くなる (mune ga atsuku naru, "my chest gets hot"). Korean uses 가슴이 벅차다 (gaseum-i beokchada, "my chest overflows"). The physical sensation of overwhelming emotion causing your chest to feel full or expanded crosses cultural boundaries.

💗 taps into this universal experience, which means it reads fairly consistently worldwide. The main variation is intensity: in East Asian messaging cultures, pink hearts in general are lighter and more casual than in Western contexts, where any heart with a "growing" narrative feels more emotionally significant.

• •💗 is the only heart emoji designed to represent a process rather than a state. Every other heart is static (❤️ = love, 💔 = heartbreak). 💗 is dynamic: love that's actively growing, caught mid-expansion.
• •The "Expanding Heart" meme format (2017) is literally 💗 as a meme. Know Your Meme documents it as the wholesome counterpart to the ironic Expanding Brain format.
• •In Slack and Discord, the shortcode :heartpulse::heartpulse: renders as 💗 (growing), not 💓 (beating). The naming mismatch has confused developers since the shortcodes were first standardized.
• •Dr. Seuss described the original growing heart in 1957: "the Grinch's small heart grew three sizes that day." 💗 is essentially the Grinch's transformation moment encoded in Unicode, 53 years later.
• •Heart Emoji Memes became so popular in 2018-2019 that creating them was a labor-intensive art form. Kapwing eventually built an automated tool because the manual process of overlaying dozens of hearts onto an image took too long.

• •💗 and 💖 look nearly identical at small text sizes. 💗 has concentric heart outlines (growing). 💖 has sparkle stars (shining). If you're on a small screen, you might not see the difference. Zoom in before reading too much into which one someone chose.
• •The :heartpulse::heartpulse: shortcode in Slack, Discord, and GitHub maps to 💗 (growing heart), not 💓 (beating heart), despite "pulse" being more associated with beating. This trips up developers regularly. If you type :heartpulse::heartpulse: expecting a beating heart, you'll get a growing one.
• •Some people use 💗 purely for its pink color without knowing the "growing" narrative. Not everyone who sends 💗 is signaling deepening feelings. For many people, it's just "a pink heart that isn't ❤️."

• •"The Grinch's small heart grew three sizes that day" from Dr. Seuss' How the Grinch Stole Christmas (1957) is the most iconic depiction of a growing heart in popular culture. The image of a heart physically expanding from emotion is exactly what 💗 represents.
• •The "Expanding Heart / My Heart" meme format (2017) turned 💗 into a wholesome counterpart to the ironic Expanding Brain meme. Instead of galaxy-brain takes, it lists things that raise your heart rate, from resting to being with someone you love.
• •Heart Emoji Memes (2018) became a genre of wholesome internet culture where subjects are surrounded by masses of heart emoji to express overwhelming positive emotion. The format became so popular that Kapwing built a dedicated tool for creating them.
• •The "Expanding Heart" article on Daily Dot described it as "the heart's positivity, which stands opposed to the brain's irony and sarcasm." In a landscape where most memes tear down, the heart meme builds up.

• •U+1F497U+1F497 is a single codepoint with no modifiers. Despite its animated-looking design, 💗 is a static character on all platforms.
• •Shortcode: :heartpulse::heartpulse: in Slack, Discord, and GitHub. Yes, it's confusing: "pulse" sounds like :heartbeat::heartbeat: (💓), but they're different emoji. This is a well-known shortcode naming issue. :heartpulse::heartpulse: = 💗 growing, :heartbeat::heartbeat: = 💓 beating.
• •For sentiment analysis, 💗 carries strongly positive valence with an "intensifying" quality. It signals growing emotional connection, which can be useful in relationship-stage classification models.

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