Snapchat has a lot of coded messages and meaning built into its code and general layout of the application. It’s tough to think of a social network that has more going on than Snapchat in the first place.
From the Snap Map feature, which shows you where your friends are at any given moment without having to have them send you their location on Google Maps, to the recently-shuttered SnapCash feature that worked as a Venmo or Apple Pay competitor, there are so many features hidden in Snapchat that it’s no wonder so many have trouble learning how to use the app when they first sign up for the service.
Augmented reality filters, Bitmoji, Snap scores – it all makes for a confusing feature, especially when you’re new to the app and might not know where to look.
One of the most basic features in Snapchat is the heart system, which essentially creates a method with which Snapchat can measure your level of friendship with another person. Like MySpace before it, Snapchat has a fully-featured best friends list that allows you to tell who you communicate with most-often on the platform. While you can have a number of bestfriends on the service, only one person at a time can be your true, ultimate best friend, the person who ranks above everyone else.
To get there, you and the other person will both need to snap each other more often than anyone else on the service, raising your friendship level through the app to become the ultimate friend. Your best friend is denoted with one of three heart emojis, each meaning and reaching a new level of friendship as you move through the platform.
Unfortunately, the hard work it takes to get your friendship level in Snapchat increased can often be ruined in a single day’s work. If you’re curious about where your Snapchat heart emojis went within the app, you aren’t alone. It can be confusing to try to figure out what happened between you and your bestie on the service. Let’s take a look into what the heart emojis mean, where they went, and how you might be able to get yours back.
What Do the Heart Emojis Mean?
As we mentioned up top, there are three levels of heart emojis on the service that each help you to learn and understand your level of friendship with another person on the service. While every single one of your best friends on the platform will have a smiling, blushing emoji, only your top mutual friend can have a heart emoji, designating that person as your shared best friend. Three different levels of friendship are available on Snapchat, and it’s worth taking a look at each of them to understand why you might lose the heart to begin with.
Yellow Heart
Our first heart to focus on is the yellow heart, which represents the first level of best friendship in the application. While it might not sound like a lot, this level of friendship is a big deal. See, while Snapchat uses an algorithm to determine who your “best friends” are on the platform (a list you can easily view when sending snaps to friends from your contacts list), only one person can truly be your number one best friend on the platform, and that person is granted a yellow heart to commemorate the occasion. This heart can change users or disappear, so if you’re looking to keep a consistent person in that top spot, you’ll want to make sure to snap your best friend regularly. Otherwise, you’ll see that yellow heart disappear – along with the chances of evolving into the other hearts on this list.
It’s also worth noting you aren’t the only one who can see this heart on Snapchat. Your best friend will be able to see the yellow heart too, meaning the next time you both meet up in real life, you’ll be able to celebrate in person.
Red Heart
Like a video game, the red heart acts as the next level inside of Snapchat. While the red heart ostensibly represents the same idea as the yellow heart, representing a shared level of best friendship on the platform, obtaining a red heart isn’t quite as easy. In order to have this red heart appear on your feed next to your best friend’s name, you’ll have to stay number one best friends with them for two straight weeks. This might sound easy, and for some it will be, but other may have to work at this one. If you start to stray away from the platform, or begin exchanging snaps and messages with tons of other users on the platform, you’ll end up exchanging your number one spot with someone else, leading to a loss of your yellow heart – and being forced to restart the entire streak of consecutive best friends.
If you happen to earn the red heart, you should feel proud of yourself and your fellow Snapper. Remaining a number one best friend inside Snapchat is no easy feat, and accomplishing that goal should be considered a job well done. That said, if you’re looking for the final tier of best friendship, you aren’t quite there yet.
Pink Hearts
This is it – the final threshold. If you’ve come this far, you’ve come a long way. Not only did you manage to become the number one best friend of another user, which on its own is no small feat, but you managed to stay strong with them for not just the two weeks required to earn a red heart, but the twomonthsrequired to earn the two pink hearts along your name. It’s been a long two months of you and your best friend sending selfies, videos, filters, effects, and more, but you did it. And for your trouble, you’ve earned the pink hearts of best friendship.
Your work isn’t done, however. Just because the hearts top out at two months doesn’t mean you’ll be able to rest on your laurels. See, in order to keep those pink hearts, you’ll have to continue your snapping with your best friend, in order to ensure you stay in their number one position. Snapchat doesn’t discuss how their Snapchat algorithm works, so while we can’t give any specific advice for you on keeping in your best friends spot, we’ll say this: snap your number one as much as possible in order to ensure you never lose that double-pink heart icon.
Why Did My Heart Emoji Disappear?
So here’s the hard truth of the matter: maintaining a heart emoji on Snapchat requires work from both sides. It’s easy to become standard best friends with someone, purely through sending them photos and videos at your own leisure, but to become best friends with someone – and gain those sweet, sweet double pink hearts after two months of being best friends – takes work from both sides. You’ll need to rely on each other to share and send snaps every day, just like a streak, in order to not accidentally begin snapping someone else too much. Even if you snap the other person like crazy, the other person might not put the same amount of work in to maintain that friendship. If that person raises their friendship level too much with someone else, or ifyou raise your own friendship level too much with someone else, you’ll lose the heart and go back to just being friends.
It’s possible to stay best friends with someone on the service indefinitely, but it’s difficult – far more difficult, even, than maintaining a long streak on the platform, since you don’t need to be friends to do that. If you no longer meet the criteria for being best friends, you’ll no longer have the heart next to that person’s name. If you do manage to lose the heart, you can regain it, but you’ll need to start back at the yellow heart, in order to work your way back up to the top.
Can I Get the Heart Back?
Beyond rebuilding the friendship level, it’s not really possible to gain back your heart emoji on Snapchat without putting in the work. Unlike the Snap streak feature, which Snapchat supports with a page dedicated to helping people find unfairly-lost Snap streaks through a support team, the best friend heart emoji isn’t something that Snapchat takes with the utmost importance, unfortunately. That doesn’t mean that you shouldn’t attempt to reach out to Snapchat if you think a major error has happened, but most likely, you’ll be informed that the heart was lost fairly, likely do to an increase in snapping other people, either on behalf of you or someone else.
Is There Anything Else I Can Do?
Sort of! Seriously, there is one option for those who are interested, though we don’t think it’s something everyone should adapt to using on the platform. Still, there’s a little-known trick in the settings menu of Snapchat that allows you to modify the emojis within your friends list, and it makes it incredibly easy to change the content and to make it look as though you have a standard hear emoji set. It’s a bit of an odd workaround, but it does work well enough to essentially trick yourself or others into thinking someone is your best friend again. Alternately, you can actually gain up to eight red hearts by using this method, just by changing the right heart emoji in the settings. Let’s take a look.
Start by opening up Snapchat, which, by default, opens to the main camera viewfinder display. Slide down from the top of the app to open your profile in Snapchat, then hit the settings gear in the top-right corner of the display.
Inside of the settings menu, scroll down to Additional Services, and select Manage from this list. Second from the top, you’ll find a “Friend Emojis” listing. Tap this to view a full list of your friend emojis.
This list gives a full of the emoji meanings in Snapchat, but also allows you to edit the emoji. To change any emoji on the list, simply tap the entry, and select a new emoji from the full list. To gain back heart emojis, and to give heart emojis to a bunch of extra people, simply select one of the many heart emojis on the list – or whatever emoji you end up wanting to use. There’s no risk here, since you can always hit Reset to Default at the bottom of the list.
