Shape of My Heart
- Thalia Echevarria
- 2 days ago
- 3 min read
Updated: 3 hours ago
How a Shape Learned to Mean Love
When I was little, I used to wonder who decided that a heart is called a heart.
Like, seriously. Who chose that word? How do words even get chosen? Why heart and not melo? Who woke up one day and said, yes, this feels right. And then, inevitably, the next question followed. Who decided to draw it like that?
Fast forward many years.
A few days ago, someone asked me what my favorite icon is to draw. Without thinking, I said a heart. No hesitation. Which immediately raised a new question on my way home. Why a heart? Why not a star? A moon? A ladybug?
A heart is symmetrical, at least in the way we use it in iconography and interfaces. It is also endlessly flexible. You can soften the edges, exaggerate the curves, sharpen the bowls, tighten the connection at the top, widen the base. Tiny adjustments completely change its personality. These are the kinds of things that occupy my thoughts most of the time.
And then, the question came back.
Why is the shape that shape?
So I did what any reasonable adult does now. I asked ChatGPT. And honestly, what came back was fascinating.
The heart shape we recognize today has very little to do with anatomy. If anything, the real human heart is almost aggressively unhelpful as a symbol. It is asymmetrical, complex, and not cute at all. Yet somehow, the symbol that came to represent love, care, friendship, and positivity looks nothing like it.
What we ended up with instead feels closer to nature than to biology.
One of the most compelling theories points to the silphium plant, now extinct, which grew in ancient Cyrene (modern Libya). It was apparently used as a contraceptive, and its seed pod was commonly depicted on coins. That shape is strikingly familiar. Softly symmetrical, tapered at the bottom, fuller at the top. Not a heart as we know it yet, but close enough to feel like an ancestor quietly claiming credit.
I’m not here to fact-check the silphium plant theory. I just love that it makes the heart make sense.
Over time, shapes get simplified. Symmetry becomes desirable. What starts as a leaf, a fruit, or a seed gets mirrored, smoothed, and repeated until it stops representing a specific object and starts representing an idea. The heart did not suddenly appear fully formed. It evolved slowly, shaped by repetition, by culture, and by our need to recognize it quickly.
That evolution is exactly how icons are born.
We tend to think of icons as shapes that someone sat down and designed one afternoon. In reality, the best icons are usually the result of many small visual decisions made over time. They are negotiated forms. Agreed-upon shapes. Visual shortcuts that survived because they worked.
At some point, this particular shape stopped being about a plant or a body part and started being about feeling. Love, connection, desire, care, health, liking something enough to tap a button. The meaning stuck, even as the original reference quietly disappeared.
That is when it became powerful.
This is what fascinates me most about the heart icon. It is not literal. It is symbolic. It does not explain itself. It simply shows up and trusts that you will understand.
As an icon designer, that is the dream, and that level of confidence is aspirational.
The heart is a reminder that icons are not about realism. They are about recognition. About distilling something complex into a form that feels obvious, even inevitable. When done well, you don’t question it. You just understand it.
I think that is why I keep coming back to the heart. It sits at the intersection of emotion, culture, and geometry. It is soft and precise at the same time. Universal, yet endlessly customizable.
And even now, after years of drawing it, refining it, and playing with its curves, I still found myself asking the same question I did as a kid…
Who decided this was the shape of love?
Maybe the better question is why it’s the sacred geometry of chance.
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