Cursive emojis

Most of these are not emoji

The 18 decorations above use 31 different characters. Only 6 of them are emoji: 🎀 🦋 🍓 🐬 🫧 ✨. 12 of the 18 decorations contain no emoji at all. The rest of what gets passed around as cursive emojis is symbols and, surprisingly often, letters and digits borrowed from other writing systems because of their shape:

• ୨ ୧ are oriya digit two and oriya digit one, from the Oriya script. Used as a pair they look like a bow; in their own script they are the numbers 2 and 1.
• ꒰ ꒱ are two radicals of the Yi script, used as soft brackets.
• ꨄ is cham letter ai, a letter of the Cham script, passed around as a heart.
• ᥫ᭡ is two characters from two scripts: tai le letter e (Tai Le) followed by balinese musical symbol dong (Balinese).
• 𐙚 is linear a sign a306, from the Linear A block, added in Unicode 7.0.

In all, 11 of the 31 characters belong to a specific script rather than being shared symbols. That is not a problem in itself — they paste like any other text — but it explains the two things that go wrong.

Why a decoration can turn into a box

A phone draws a character only if one of its fonts contains it. Current phones generally have a colour emoji font, so emoji are the safe part, with one caveat: an emoji only exists from the Unicode version that added it, and 🫧 arrived in Unicode 14.0, so an older phone that has not been updated shows a box. Letters from the Linear A, Cham or Tai Le scripts need a font for that script, and not every device has one. The table below draws every character on the device you are using now.

The test compares each character with a code point that has no character assigned: if the two come out pixel-for-pixel the same, the character is a box here. It says nothing about anyone else’s phone. To check a whole style of cursive text rather than the decorations, use the box test.

The heart that carries an extra character

Copies of ꨄ on copy-and-paste sites can arrive with U+FE0E straight after it. U+FE0E is the variation selector that asks for the plain-text form of a symbol that also has an emoji form. Unicode’s list of variation sequences has no entry for ꨄ, which has no emoji form to switch away from, so the selector changes nothing on screen. It still counts as a character in a bio. The builder here leaves it out.

Using them

Around the line puts one decoration at each end, the usual choice for a bio or a display name. Every word repeats it around each word, which reads better with a single emoji than with a long border. Only letters and digits are converted, so an emoji you type yourself stays as it is.

Each piece costs characters. 6 of the 31 characters here are outside the Basic Multilingual Plane and count as two UTF-16 units in apps that count that way, exactly like the cursive letters. Before you paste into a short field, check the fit on the Instagram or Discord page. For more hearts, the hearts style has five kinds, and the aesthetic style puts sparkles around your text in one step.