️ Variation Selector-16

An invisible codepoint which specifies that the preceding character should be displayed with emoji presentation. Only required if the preceding character defaults to text presentation.

Often used in Emoji ZWJ Sequences, where one or more characters in the sequence have text and emoji presentation, but otherwise default to text (black and white) display.

Variation Selector-16 was approved as part of Unicode 3.2 in 2002 and added to draft Emoji 6.0 in 2017.