Heart emojis #222
Comments
Heraldic Colored and Patterned Hearts
Historically, there have been alternate systems of heraldic hatching. ISO 81714-2 section 6.9 defines and IEC 81714-2 Annex H shows example patterns for the “design of graphical symbols for use in the technical documentation of products”. Other technical drawing standards also cover many colors, materials and patterns. Some are based on and compatible with traditional heraldic patterns, e.g. German DIN 201 and ISO 128-50 section 5.
ConclusionThe monochrome reference glyphs in the Unicode Standard, for Hearts and other colored emojis, should use a common hatching pattern system and the one established in (European) heraldry seems sufficient and appropriate. Only the Yellow Heart and Orange Heart reference glyphs currently agree with that, though. Adobe‘s Source Emoji typeface already does follow the heraldic convention. |
Linguistic Color TheoryLanguages differ in which primary colors they distinguish at the native lexeme level, see WALS 132. It is usually 3 to 6 out of these primaries:
Major composite terms are found for these:
Then there are several derived (intersective) categories or mixtures:
ConclusionThis calls for the further addition of a White Heart emoji and probably also explicitly Gray and Pink Hearts emojis and perhaps a Brown Heart emoji. |
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Unicode Utilities: UnicodeSet “subhead = Heart symbol” Google Hangouts / AndroidHere’s Google’s infamous Hairy Heart in context. Also see the respective Android bug tracker issue. Images provided by Emojipedia, except final column directly taken from the Noto Emoji repository.
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Monochrome Fonts
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Original Japanese Heart Emoji
NTT Docomo (i-mode)
Softbank
KDDI (au), EZweb
ObservationRed Heart has been unified with Pink Heart and disunified from Red Heart Suit. |
Colored Metals, Gemstones etc.
ConclusionA White Heart is missing, since Heart Decoration is a bad substitute. (By this esoteric metric, an Orange Heart was not missing.) |
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PS: Michael Everson submitted a formal Proposal to add heraldic hatching characters to the UCS (L2/11-094 = N4011) which failed back in 2011, i.e. there were neither more characters added nor the existing ones properly annotated. N258A is also relevant in the context of hearts: it proposed combining heart characters. |
Colors of the RainbowPhysically, a rainbow has more colors than any human could count, i.e. virtually an infinite number. When people are drawing rainbows, however, they are often not painting a seamless gradient from (ultra)violet to (infra)red, but stripes of separate colors. This is also evident in the Rainbow 🌈 and the Rainbow Flag 🏳️🌈 emojis. I have not yet found scientific research that would explain cultural (e.g. Roy G. Biv mnemonic) and individual factors of how many and which colors someone will ascribe to a rainbow, but the Orange Heart 🧡 emoji is being added to Unicode 10.0 to purportedly complete the set of nominal colors of the rainbow, see its original proposal L2/16-124: “Emoji users occasionally want to represent the rainbow as a series of colored hearts, but the absence of an orange heart emoji prevents this from being realized satisfactorily for many users.” (It lists several other arguments in its favor, too.) The Black Heart 🖤 added in Unicode 9.0 (2016, proposal) is obviously not part of this series and neither would be a complementing White Heart emoji. A quick analysis of image search results from Google shows that
I don't know whether that constitutes a strong case in favor of Violet Heart, Teal Heart or Pink Heart, but it certainly is not reason enough alone. |
ProposalsL2/17-228 proposes an emoji sequence U+2764+200D+1F52A ❤️ + 🔪 where the knife might be replaced by a dagger U+1F5E1 🗡️. ❤🔪 ❤🗡. It has been rejected. |
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Brown and White Heart emojis are Candidates for Emoji 12.0 (2019). |
Yngvi/Freyr |
count;
Look at the sun's spectrum by prism. (Not by a diffraction grating like a CD as that imposes a mode and harmonics.) You'll see the two broadest bands are at the ends, one for each end opsin. You'll also see that violet is one of those; therefore violet is a primary rather than the blue of CRTs and palettes. The mid band for the mid opsin is green, slim due to the crowding with the other opsins. There are two other slim contrastive bands for each two opsins. These threefold peaks lead to the odd division of the spectrum: red, yellow, green, shore, violet. Bands near these tend to be conflated for them. The more observant and articulate coin further: red, brazen, yellow, chartreuse, green, glass, shore, blue, violet. Dependent on whether violet gets leveled for luminosity it could become lilac. The three other hues of the color wheel add mauve, pink, and purple under lilac or lavender, eggplant, and plum under violet, where mauve-lavender replaces sky-dusk under the blue primary. The dark shades of the nine-banded spectrum are auburn, brown, sallow, moss, kelly, teal, verdigris, navy, violet. Nonspectral hues are representatively important of course; flesh is purple to pink. Petals take up the gamut. Glass is the same hue as some of the better emeralds, which I own a lab-grown one. There are heart-cut emeralds that are essentially tealish hearts: https://www.google.com/search?q=%22heart-cut+emerald%22&tbm=isch. Amethysts make up lilac-violet: https://www.google.com/search?q=%22heart-cut+amethyst%22&tbm=isch. |
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I found a few problems with my above explanation. First there are many pictures of the spectrum but there's no way to tell if they're real, drawn, or computer-generated or what the source, weather, window, time, and latitude are or whether the camera can be trusted. So whereas there are a few spectrum pictures where violet dominates blue, most pictures don't even show violet and a few show sliht violet besides the dominant blue: I don't know why some spectra are dominant in violet; something had to filter blue. Could it be a glass additive? So I went looking for a definitive scientific treatment of the spectrum and found this: The spectrum awfully disagrees with the CIE color tongue: Its 360nm end only touches what I had called violet, blue-pink, and its 730nm end has purple whereas the spectrum fades into dark red at 700 nm. Dependent on whether dark 621 nm looks like 700 nm (to the eye in case it picks up off-gamut of sRGB) I may need to distinguish between maroon as dark red and auburn as red-infrared. According to tristimulus, the primaries are opsin net maxima whereas two of the tertiaries are opsin gross maxima. As seen in the prisms' slimmer dispersions they make red (net long-mid, ~630 nm), brazen (gross long, ~597 nm), yellow (gross long-mid, ~579 nm), chartreuse (gross mid, ~555 nm), green (net long-mid-short, ~518 nm), shore (gross mid-short, ~496 nm), and blue (gross and seemingly net short-long-mid, ~449 nm) or seven hues, without violet. These figures are based on the CIE color-matching curves which mostly match the observatory's spectrum but annoyingly not the CIE color tongue on the same page. Its 449 nm is near where my violet is whereas the spectrum's is short of sRGB blue. Maybe the color-matching curves are wrong too; they're not universal: https://www.google.com/search?q=tristimulus&tbm=isch. The spectrum implies the long cone overtakes the short cone by 403 nm. That'd explain why violet and blue look different. Under magnification glass-teal, (emerald/medicine/glaucose), sky-dusk, lilac-violet, pink-eggplant?, and purple-plum? should show up which means the whole color wheel's rim could fit in the spectrum, or 12 hues. Argh GitHub doesn't support TIFF or files more than 10MB. I changed my mind; most of the original image is redundant and there's no need to keep most of the rows so I scaled it to 1080 then saved another PNG that can be embedded here. (original file 131·183MB, 5464.tif 36·377MB, 1080.tif 4·666MB, 1080.png 7·274MB) |
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🫀 Anatomical Heart |
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https://www.unicode.org/L2/L2021/21075-heart-emoji-coverage.pdf With this document by the ESC, pink, gray and aqua/cyan heart emojis have become much more likely. |
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Candidates for 2022 Emoji 15.0 https://emojipedia.org/grey-heart/ |
The Heart doesn’t look much like the human organ, but is a very popular symbol nevertheless. Some say the physical origins of the symbol are rather a buttocks or vulva/vagina. Unicode already has several color variants, but there is some demand for even more variety. For a Rainbow Heart see #173. An Orange Heart emoji is already accepted for Unicode 10 (June 2017).
Petitions
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