Sometimes it’s best to show your feelings by using emoticons instead of words. Words can be clumsy, or just time consuming. Meanwhile, you want to bypass words and go straight to the idea. That’s the sort of thing emoticons (or emoji) simulate. Like the cartoon character who gets so angry that a storm cloud forms over his head, or so happy that she starts levitating, communicating with emoticons creates the impression of an experience so pure, and so all-consuming, that it can’t satisfactorily be put into words. That’s why I’ve created this post showing you how to make your own heart on Facebook.
Be it a broken heart, hearts of different colors, or an old school red valentine heart, I’ve got you covered. I’ll also break down options for iPhone, Android, Mac and PC depending on what device you’re using and what type of heart you want to show your friends, since Facebook is available through every platform.
But first, I’ll give you a little background on the emoji compared to an emoticon, how they were developed and how they’re meant to be used. This is especially important when using different devices and texting with people from different countries, as sometimes different cultures have developed contradictory ways to express emotions graphically, and the emoji meanings may be different.
“The best and most beautiful things in the world cannot be seen or even touched – they must be felt with the heart.” – Helen Keller
Facebook Heart Meaning and Origin
If you’re unfamiliar with emoji then you likely haven’t been texting for very long. Or ever. It’s an incredibly popular way to express your emotions in a concise and simple way. In the 1990’s a team of Japanese developers created a set of 172 emoji that were simple 8 bit images used to convey emotions in a simple image. Emoji are simply graphical extension of the punctuation based emoticons that had already taken hold in popular usage. Instead of saying “I’m smiling right now,” a simple “: )” said the same thing. Well, emoji goes a step further, by replacing that “: )” (or any other popular combination) with an actual picture of a little smiling face.
Immediately these emoji took off and became instantly a commonly used feature of texting among friends. Different developers jumped on the bandwagon and developed even more emoji to express not only a wider ranger of emtions, but to help communicate other ideas pictorially: a rose, an airplane, a piece of sushi. Or my favorite, the smiling piece of poop. When I look through emoji lists, I’m not always sure what I would use a particular icon for. But rest assured, somebody out there is using them. So much so that now most smart phones include an additional “emoji keyboard” standard as part of their native messaging apps, so you won’t be tempted to switch to a third-party app for you messaging needs.This is a simple and easy way to let everyone know how you feel or what you’re thinking without having to spell it out. On top of that, it’s fun and can be silly to use depending on which emoji you choose to send.
Because of this incredible popularity, Facebook has built in a set of heart emoji into their system so you can use them when updating your status, commenting on a photo, or using Facebook Messenger with friends. However, actually implementing a heart emoji and figuring out what different devices work with different emoji is not a trivial pursuit.
The Various Heart Emoji & Meanings
You may or may not be well versed when it comes to creating your very own heart emoji. Below Is a quick view of all the various hearts that you can use and ones that Facebook supports on their platform. I’ll outline each one and a quick description from left to right.
- A standard red heart that everyone is familiar with
- A broken heart, let’s hope you won’t have to use this one often
- Red heart with less glare. This is just another variation of the standard heart.
- Vibrating pink heart. A common emoji when you’re feeling a ton of love all over. (This one also could be used as a growing heart, such as how the Grinch’s heart grew three sizes when he finally realized the meaning of Christmas.)
- Another variation of a vibrating pink heart
- Two pink hearts (which could mean a number of things: your heart and the heart of the person you like, just a series of heart bubbles, like in the cartoons, or maybe that you’re a romantic Time Lord)
- A few twinkles on top of a heart. Not sure the point of this one. Maybe you just got your heart waxed and detailed.
- Two hearts moving in a circle. Merry Go Round!
- An arrow through a heart (Cupid). Another great one for Valentine’s day.
- A yellow, blue, purple, and green heart. A bit unconventional, but still pretty cool.
- A pink heart wrapped in a bow. This is a great Valentine’s day emoji.
- An emoji face blowing a kiss. This is often used to a loved one to send kisses to them. Don’t use this one too early, as you may come across as creepy if you’re not at that stage yet.
- Someone with heart as their eyes. This typically means you love someone or love something like pizza.
- A cat with heart eyes. Which is much better than how cats usually communicate love: by vomiting in your shoes.
- Two people loving each other in two variations
- Sending a heartfelt message
- A church of love, a common emoji used for weddings and religious holidays.
- Sending love to a hospital. I hope you won’t have to use this but it’s often used if someone you love is sick in a hospital.
- A candy heart that are common around Valentine’s day or just a white heart inside of a pink square.
Now that we’ve got a good idea what our options are let’s get into a bit more detail on how to make a heart on Facebook and break it down by device depending on whether you’re on a PC, Mac, iPhone or Android.
Make A Facebook Heart Tricks
As with a lot of things, there are many ways to get what you’re looking for depending on how much time you want to put in, how much knowledge you have about messing with settings, and whether you want to customize the heart to a more unique one.
1. Easy Pink Heart
If you’re going for a very simple heart that is just the basic pink heart shown in the screenshot above you can go to any device and type in “<3” without the quotes. You will notice the heart won’t turn into an emoji right away. After you hit enter you will see it changes to a pink heart.
If you want to test this out before committing to hitting enter and everyone seeing it, you can set the status to private so you will only be able to see it and then just delete the status update right after you post it. That’s a good way to check to see whether any of these emoji’s work on your device.
This is a very standard option so it should work on any device and any operating system. If you want more of a variety then you will have to work a bit harder.
2. Copy and Paste Heart
The next option you have is to copy and paste an emoji from somewhere else and use it on your very own Facebook status or comment. This will work if you see an emoji on Facebook or on Google. The best site in my opinion for emoji’s is Emojipedia you can check out their site and copy and paste all of the options below straight into Facebook.
Even if your computer or mobile phone doesn’t support the emoji, you will notice that Facebook does. Therefore, you may find that some of the emoji are just blank squares. This means that the emoji is not supported by your device or operating system. But just copy and paste it into Facebook and hit publish to see it show up as a real heart!
This is your best and easiest option when it comes to showing any different type of heart on Facebook. However, if you use a certain heart often, you won’t want to find the website that has the emoji every time and copy and paste it. That’s when it’s more helpful to just have an emoji keyboard enabled on your computer so that you can easily type any emoji you want, including a heart.
Next up, I’ll walk you through steps to get an emoji keyboard on your PC, Mac, iPhone or Android device depending on what you use regularly.
Heart Emoji on an iPhone
If you use an iPhone you can turn on the built in emoji keyboard so you can find and use hearts often. To turn it on, simply follow these steps.
- Go to your iPhone and tap on the Settings icon.
- Then go to General and Keyboard.
- Tap on Keyboards and tap to add a new keyboard.
- Scroll down the list until you find emoji and tap it.
- This will enable the emoji keyboard for use whenever you type on your iPhone. All you have to do is look for the little globe icon when you see the keyboard pop up. Tap the globe and the emoji keyboard will appear.
TIP: If you repeatedly use a heart emoji on Facebook you can tap the little clock icon at the bottom of the emoji keyboard, which is your recently used icons. This is a quick and easy way to get back to your heart and use it.
Heart Emoji on Android
If your main device of choice is an Android then you also have an easy way to enable emoji. Luckily, for both Android and iPhone, there are built in emoji keyboard so you won’t have to download external 3rd party apps to provide keyboards. You can turn them on by following these steps.
- On your Android device, head over to the settings app.
- Then tap on Language and input then Google Keyboard Settings.
- You will notice an option for add-on dictionaries, go ahead and tap on it.
- Download and install the Emoji for English Words app.
Then make sure you refresh the keyboard and you may have to quit out of Facebook for it to appear on the keyboard but you’ve just enabled heart emoji on your Android. Whenever you type a status or comment, you can quickly navigate to your favorite emoticon.
Facebook Emoji on PC or Mac
If you’re on a PC and want to insert your own favorite heart you can do so quickly and easily. All you have to do is open up the Character Map. The easiest way to do that is to click on the start icon at the bottom left and type in “Character Map” in the search icon. When the app comes up, click it to open.
Then you will just navigate to your favorite heart emoji, right click on it or press control + c to copy and paste it into your Facebook status.
If you’re on a Mac, it’s a similar process as with a PC. You will first want to head over to Facebook and click on the status or comment section. From there, click on the edit tab at the top, the third menu item from the left. At the very bottom you will notice the option for special characters. Click on it and scroll through the list of emoji until you find the heart one you want to use.
Right click on the heart emoji and paste it into the Facebook text box. You will notice that it also pastes a bunch of other info including the description and the unicode that is used to create the image. Just delete those and you can hit publish!
That wraps up this guide and hopefully gave you a clear idea of all the options out there in making a heart on Facebook. Also, particularly when it comes to cutting and pasting, know that you’re not always limited to just smiley faces and hearts. I’ve got a rotating stable of about half a dozen images I really like sending out to people in place of the standard emoticons. Right now, my favorite is Linda Belcher shouting “Alriiight,” though that is admittedly better suited to messaging than to Facebook.
Let us know in the comments if you have any other methods we haven’t thought of. It would also be great if you would share this post with your friends!