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Comment by yung_steezy | Hacker News Reader

I never used emojis in my private life until I started working as a software developer. I end up using them all day, everyday on Slack at work and now they have bled into my vocabulary everywhere.

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I preferred simple smileys and have used them privately in the IRC days. But emoji actually have more variety, color-wise. I recently started dating and it's incredibly wholesome to get a heart emoji, which comes in a dozen or so colors.

What's funny about that particular emoji, is that the hearts are actually different, separate emoji. While many others, like the U+1F9D1 PERSON emoji, can be combined with skin tones.

I'm not quite certain why there isn't a simple HEART emoji, modified with a color but it's probably historical.

I believe the emoji modifiers appeared much later than the hearts variations. The red heart is also an OG emoji and variations, such as broken heart (2010) and purple heart (2010) came much later. The skin tone modifiers seem to appear in 2017, and some other joined emoji seem to date back to 2015 [2]. So in summary, it's historical and changing it would break unicode.

[1] https://emojipedia.org/search/?q=heart [2] https://emojipedia.org/eye-in-speech-bubble/

The hearts also used to have conflicting descriptions, or at least confusing templates. The charming hairy heart from Android 4.4 was fun.

https://emojipedia.org/google/android-4.4/yellow-heart/

My problem is every chat app now interprets :) as an emoji.

At least you seem happy about that.

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