Text Style vs. Emoji Style: Why One Character Has Two Faces

Have you ever encountered this problem: you copy an emoji, but when you paste it, it appears in black and white. Why does the same character have two faces—one black-and-white, one colorful? What's the secret?

Who Decides How a Character Is Displayed?

How a character is displayed is not fixed; it may show as a regular black-and-white character or as a colorful emoji. This is determined by the rendering engine, the current font, and the character's default presentation property in the Unicode standard. For example, in a plain text environment, it appears as a black-and-white character, while in a chat app, it appears as a colorful emoji. To remove this uncertainty and explicitly specify which style to display, we need to add a special character after the character to tell the system how to display it.

Variation Selectors: The Character's “Style Switch”

These special characters that allow a character to display in different styles are called “variation selectors.” Variation selectors are usually invisible; you can't see them.

There are two variation selectors:

• U+FE0E (Variation Selector-15 / VS15): Forces the character to display in text style (usually black-and-white, monochrome).
• U+FE0F (Variation Selector-16 / VS16): Forces the character to display in emoji style (usually colorful, pictorial).

For example, the smiley character “☺” has the code point U+263A. After adding different variation selectors, the display is as follows:

Before emoji existed, the Unicode Consortium had already encoded many symbol characters (e.g., ☹︎ ☺︎ ♠︎ ♣︎ ♥︎ ♦︎). For instance, the smiley symbol "☺" looks very similar to the later emoji ☺️. So when designing emoji encoding, the Unicode Consortium decided not to create a new code point but to reuse the code for this smiley. The method is to add a special character to turn it into an emoji. You can think of it as adding a modifier to the original black-and-white character to turn it into a colorful emoji. This approach preserves backward compatibility with historical data while meeting the visual expression needs of modern devices — a clever design indeed.

Special Cases

There is another special category: keycap symbols, including #, *, and digits 0–9. These characters are different from ordinary symbols: simply adding U+FE0F only turns them into colored symbols, not emoji. To display them as keyboard button styles like #️⃣ or 1️⃣, a three-part sequence is required: original character + U+FE0F (emoji variation selector) + U+20E3 (Combining Enclosing Keycap). U+20E3 is a special enclosing character that wraps the preceding character in a square keycap border; it cannot be displayed alone and must be attached to the previous character — which is why keycap emoji require an extra suffix.

Normal Character vs Emoji Comparison Table

Normal characters should display as black-and-white, but you might see them as colorful emoji. As mentioned earlier, your environment can affect the display style of characters.